


The Bright Side

by gidget_goes



Category: Naruto
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - 1990s, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Vampire Slayer, Anyways, Awkward Romance, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Gothic, Horror, Inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), M/M, Mild Language, Non-Graphic Violence, Slow Burn, but only at first
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2020-09-23 17:01:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 82,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20343577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gidget_goes/pseuds/gidget_goes
Summary: “To be fair, beheading, immolation, and stakes through the hearts kill most things, living or not.”But Rock Lee can’t afford to play those guessing games: not when a storm of the undead is brewing over his Konoha town, and definitely not when his friends are depending on him to get to the bottom of a mystery crawling with gang violence and vampire politics. When a new crew of vampires pops up (likesomany morning-after pimples) Lee and the other Slayers are convinced that they’re the shadowy enemy they’ve been tracking – but will Lee learn to keep his feelings separate from his duties to humanity? And when the time comes, will he know where his loyalties lie?





	1. Smells Like Teen Spirit

“Ugh. Could they hurry up a little? We’re not getting any younger here.”

“Well, I mean—”

“Lee, man, I love you, but I _don’t _want to hear it.”

Lee – Rock Lee on his driver’s license, not that he was widely known as _“Rock”_ – could only frown, watching his friend slump against the gravestone. Tenten Pema Sherpa might have singlehandedly dragged herself across the oceans to the United States of Shinobi to be raised as a vampire Slayer, but now, she could have been any one of a thousand disaffected something-teens roaming the sleepy streets of Kurama after dark. Her borrowed flannel dwarfed her wiry frame, and she hadn’t taken her hair out of the space buns she’d put them up in for the day’s cheerleading practice. All in all, she looked as close as Lee had ever seen her to _“defeated,” _stake slipping in her grasp.

“Thirty more minutes, Tenten.” Lee had zipped his favourite windbreaker up neatly over his best Jazzercise Spandex, and he’d wrapped an old Scrunchie around the hilt of his own stake for safety’s sake. The Slayer’s handbook stated one should always be prepared. Lee might have broken out in hives every time he reached for their friend Neji’s yellowed copy, and he might have chickened out of the stick-and-poke tattoo he’d been tempted to get of its cursive title, but that was not to say he didn’t live, die, and _un_-die by its codes. He was _always_ prepared. “Thirty minutes,” he said once more, offering Tenten the scarf he’d pointedly thought ahead to bring. “Then we can call it a night.”

Tenten muttered something that sounded an awful lot like_ “I’m thirty minutes from ripping your face off,” _but Lee figured that perhaps – with the crescent moon a knife slash through the sky and barely budding branches stretching across the graveyard grounds like so many skeletal fingers – perhaps his imagination might have been running wild.

All the same, when thirty minutes had come and gone, and the only thing to disturb the fresh plot of ground was a tiny present dropped from some pigeon on the night shift, even Lee had to press his head to his hands. It wasn’t that he wanted the dead to rise – really, the bereaved had it hard enough, without their dearly departed bursting from the grave to suck flesh – but tonight marked nearly a week of stakeouts without a single vamp attack. Anyone might have been concerned: even the local sheriffs were wary of celebrating the sudden drop in otherwise nightly maulings. _Do not assume there are no crocodiles, _Lee found himself thinking, _just because the water is calm. _Kurama was a small town. Things weren’t supposed to change there. Things weren’t supposed to go quiet.

Which must have meant there was a reason things had.

At first, two nights without incident, Lee had dared (to a chorus of groans and _“come _on_, man”_s) to hope that _“reason”_ was that they’d somehow finished the job. Slayers were few and far between, these days, which meant those that the Council did have on hand were worked to the bone travelling the world to stake out vampiric activity – in both meanings of the term. Lee and Tenten, along with their Watcher, Neji, had been running up and down the States’ west coast since their middle school years to keep the monsters under control. And after their most recent job in a tiny town called Forks, where they’d rescued a human girl from _marriage_ to a bloodsucking nightmare, Lee was wont to think their group was good at what they did.

But on Monday, any hopes he’d left of a vampire-less Kurama had been dashed. Because on Monday, a local named Sakura Haruno had found the severed head of known drug dealer – and vampire – Sasuke Uchiha on the doormat to her dorm room.

_ “She didn’t even show up to cheer afterward,” _Tenten had sighed, as their group convened that afternoon at the local library. She’d come wielding her pom-poms like daggers, dark eyes sharp. _“She must _seriously_ have been wigging.”_

It had been to Tenten that Sakura had finally turned to with her fears. For while the sheriff’s department simply recommended the young Miss Haruno stay off of drugs, Tenten had taken her friend’s words gravely when Sakura had sworn that above that decisive slash, Sasuke’s jugular had been pierced by two neat pinpricks.

_ “Maybe they were mosquito bites,”_ Lee remembered offering. The words had gotten the last of Tenten’s macchiato dumped down his shirt.

Burger King was the only place both open at midnight and in paging range of Kurama’s largest burial grounds, though Lee could hardly help but shudder as he and Tenten meandered into the fluorescent glow of its wide windows. In its harsh light, Lee knew the reflective stripes down his jacket sleeves would have been blinding to even human passersby, and Tenten’s skin seemed sallow and thin, veins below it stark, if not quite alive. Perhaps it was the discomfort that prompted Lee to fold his arms against his chest, wrinkling his nose at the sign above them.

“Tenten,” he broached, “you’re a woman, right?”

“Last I checked.” Tenten knew him well enough to know which comments deserved retort, whether or not they garnered it. “Why?”

“Just . . . Burger ‘King.’ Is that not unnecessarily gendered? Or – given the horrors of the fast food industry and the brutality of livestock farming in the States – would it then be _inappropriate_ for a restaurant chain to be called Burger ‘Queen?’” Lee had long eyelashes, especially for a boy, and he could feel their tips brush under heavy-knit brows as he blinked. “And does _that _have damaging connotations in that it, well, _connotes_ to the patriarchal idea of women being stuck in the kitchen? You know, like the Wendy’s brand does . . . ” He splayed his hands, and the contrast of the pale skin of his palms to the rich brown of the rest of his complexion was more jarring than ever in the light spilling from the offending fast food restaurant. “I just don’t want to overstep,” he told Tenten at last, frowning despite himself. “As a man, I can’t help but feel that while I might ask questions, I’m in no place to answer them.”

Tenten only smiled. It was a weary sort of affair: though the edges of her eyes crinkled up, they also slid shut as her lips dropped once more; her muffled tone was softened further by a yawn. “I don’t know, Lee,” she said. “I’ve never thought about it. I don’t even like Burger King.”

That, Lee supposed, was fair enough. Their fries were sort of nasty.

They found Neji Hyuga in a corner table, and between his placement and the fact that he still hadn’t changed out of his black greatcoat and his immaculate blazer, he seemed the spitting image of some mafioso, some _yakuza _crime boss: all cool, cutting elegance, up until someone got shot. But even as he pushed mirrored sunglasses higher on the pale planes of his face, Lee knew Neji only _looked _dangerous. Beneath all that dark wool, he was willowy and frail (anaemic, Lee was pretty sure, which was why he supplied Neji with iron supplements and protein shakes every morning). Even the dark sunglasses were just to protect his eyes, milky-white and all but blind. Still, even adding cataracts to his sweater-vest collection and his fondness for sudoku didn’t _actually_ make Neji an octogenarian in a college sophomore’s body. Those pale, unblinking eyes were commonplace for the Hyuga family, who could trace their lineage back to a shapeshifting kelpie.

_ Or maybe they were a selkie? _Lee didn’t actually really know. What he did know was that his friend, one-sixteenth demon on his dad’s side (and a quarter Uzushio on his mom’s) couldn’t see in any environment better-illuminated from the seafloors his father’s ancestors had risen from.

Yet another reason to hate Burger King, and those awful halogen lights.

“How was patrol?” Neji wanted to know, moving to clear an untouched carton of fries and his soda cup from the table – and the stack of enormous grimoires in front of him, pages warped and crackly. That part, Lee knew, was his fault. He and Tenten had taken to using sewing needles and resin to push braille lettering into the Watchers’ historic (and many) tomes, but unlike his fellow Slayer, he’d never had a very steady hand. Neji liked to say it was the thought that counted.

“Patrol was _so fun_,” drolled Tenten, dropping into the booth beside Neji. She took a fry from the box, let it hang, limply, in front of her, and then set it back. “We killed four thousand vampires. And Lee ended sexism.”

“See, that last part didn’t actually sound sarcastic,” said Neji, flashing Lee a smile. It faded quickly, and Lee pretended not to notice as Neji lifted his sunglasses to swipe at his eyes. It had been the worst kind of week, thus far: both long and uneventful, their drudging steps heavy with the leaden weight of knowing the calm they sat in was only the one before the storm. “Still no vamps, then?”

Lee knew that the sticky silence to settle, like so much spilled soda, over their table would hardly go unnoticed; Neji might not have really been able to see the grimaces Lee and Tenten flashed one another, but he would have known full well they were there. But the notion wasn’t quite strong enough to twist the squiggle of Lee’s frown into something that might have passed for neutral. When he spoke, his voice was half-strangled. “How was your night, Neji?” he managed. “Did you get at the head?”

If Neji, who owned monogrammed pyjamas and considered silk ties _“casual,” _was at all bothered by the blunt question, he didn’t show it. “Only for a minute,” he sighed. They’d learned that one of the morgue operatives had strenuous ties to the Watchers’ Council, but their ties to the cops they actually worked for would always be stronger. “I couldn’t be sure whether they were fang marks,” he relented, after a beat. “The police sure don’t care about _those_ marks anyhow. They’re saying it’s just gang violence – and the work of someone who’d seen _The Godfather _too many times. Sakura barely knew the guy, right?”

“Sasuke’s boyfriend, Naruto Uzumaki, was one of her childhood friends. Er, I guess he still is,” mused Lee. “But,” he rushed to add, “I think it’s a bit too soon to go barging down his door. He just lost his _boyfriend_!”

“His boyfriend sold crack! To minors!” Tenten snapped back, slamming her palms down on the plastic of the table. Lee could hardly help but stiffen at her outburst, and he felt, rather than saw, as Tenten deflated across from him. “Sakura’s just as traumatised as this kid,” she huffed. “But unlike him, _she_ has no idea why Sasuke Uchiha’s killer would be reaching out to her. Now that we’ve blown our in with the morgue, and we can’t be sure whether it _was_ a vamp attack, it’s more important than ever we follow up on leads.”

“So what’s the plan?” Neji spread his hands. “Where do we go from here?”

This early in the spring, the persistent cloud cover was still wary to give way to rain. Instead, they pressed down on Kurama with a smothering intent, and what air was left felt to Lee like fibreglass: the ozone crackling through it pressing into his skin like so many glass shards, until he could no longer breathe. Maybe that was why he felt the silence shrouding their table was so immovable, so very heavy – and perhaps that was why it wasn’t lifted when the young man from behind the counter swung by their corner table to ask, “Uh, are you guys leaving soon?”

Because the answer to either question was the same. Lee didn’t know.

The Watchers’ Council might contractually have been obligated to provide residencies for their Slayers, wherever they ended up, but with Tenten staying in her Konoha State University dorm and Neji too proud to share a kitchen full time with someone wise enough to know an oven could double as a clothes dryer (to save on quarters, of course) Lee often found himself in the two-room walkup alone.

_ “Often”_ was the key word, of course. For even though Neji only spent three nights a week in the slightly larger of their two tiny rooms, Lee still stayed on the fold-out couch (that didn’t fold out all the way, because the walls were too close together). The smaller room belonged to a bevy of collapsible wheelchairs and several miles of quilts – and their owner, Olympic gold medalist Maito Gai.

“Lee! Is that you, boy?” Gai’s voice might have been muted, slightly, by one of those heavy quilts and by a palpable fatigue, but Lee would never be so stupid as to call it weak. “Come in here and give a young man a hug!”

“Hey, Gai.” Lee found him half-buried under bedlinens that hadn’t quite made it over his mattress, and scooped him into a one-armed embrace as he moved to start stuffing pillows into pillowcases fresh from the oven. “When did you get in?”

“Almost an hour ago.” Though Gai was fully capable of swinging himself upright, digging his spine into the wall for support, Lee knew him well enough to know he would not be helping him make the bed. “One of the, ah, neighbours helped me get my chair up the stairs.”

“One of the neighbours, huh?” asked Lee. He knew Gai wouldn’t be able to see it, not from under either of their matching fringes, but Lee cocked an eyebrow all the same. They’d lived in Kurama nearly a year, now, and Lee had yet to see anyone not appointed by the Council ever emerge from one of the building’s cramped apartments.

Gai was already frail, bone-thin under his jumper, but he seemed to deflate even further under Lee’s scrutiny – if only for a minute. Then he was smiling once more, and announced, with the blustering ambiguity of a politician, “Did I say ‘neighbour?’ I meant a _nurse_. From the hospital.”

Lee might have believed it without the toothy artifice. As it was, though, he sighed, sinking down on the mattress beside Gai. “Is it someone we know?” he prompted him. Then, “Seeing as, well, our only _real_ line of defence in this place is the fact that vamps can’t come in without invitations—”

“I did raise you well” was all Gai had to say to that, peeling himself from the wall to pat Lee on the back. As he always did, Lee pretended not to notice the grimace the gesture raised on Gai’s face – or the way it shifted the blankets from his lap to show where dark jeans ended and too-white sheets began. It had been nearly six months since the sepsis had taken Gai’s right leg, as well, but Lee would never be used to the fact that the former Olympic gymnast now sewed his pants up like pillowcases.

He found their _“nurse”_ at the kitchen table, her pale hands folded neatly in her lap (which connected to two perfectly fine legs, Lee noticed – not that he cared). Ino Yamanaka seemed starkly out of place against the chipped tile of the backsplash, her go-go boots too shiny on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, but she smiled all the same as she rose to meet Lee in the doorway, extending a hand for him to shake.

“Lee, right?” she asked, by means of introduction. Lee nodded, and she flashed a covergirl grin, as though the revelation were the most fascinating thing in the world. “I thought so. I’ve heard so much about you from Sakura.”

“Gods, really?” Lee mostly knew Sakura through Tenten, who had found collegiate cheerleading was as good a cover as any for her Slayer training. Sakura, for her part, had found throwing her classmates through the air was almost as good an outlet for her preternatural strength as bench-pressing cars. At first, Lee had been convinced she was some kind of demon – a werewolf, perhaps – but every test their group had run had come back negative. Sakura just worked really hard.

Lee respected that. He considered it an honour to spar with her, on the rare occasion Sakura showed up to the gym’s Tae Bo lessons – and an honour of equal merit to have her knock the wind out of him. She had a mean haymaker.

“ . . . ran into your dad,” Ino was going on. Her voice was only just brassy enough to pull him from his reverie, and he tried for a smile to match Ino’s as she sat, tossing her long blonde hair like punctuation. “Or, _is_ Mr. Gai your dad? You don’t really, like, look alike. Not aside from . . . ”

“The hair,” Lee chorused alongside her. He heard it often enough. Gai had taken him in off the streets of inner-city Konohagakure, the state capital, when he was around six. At the time, malnutrition and the stresses of homelessness had left Lee rather bald (and all too aware that though it wasn’t necessarily visible, dark skin definitely _did _sunburn). It had been the saddest day of a rehabilitated Lee’s life to realise his natural wiry curls would only grow in a halo upward and outward, rather than sleek and glossy like Gai’s did.

It had been the saddest day of Gai’s life to see his foster son come home from middle school with hair he’d chemically straightened into a bowl-cut.

Still, the rise of the Backstreet Boys and that new _Romeo and Juliet_ movie meant bowl-cuts were cool, now – and besides, Lee knew he looked good. He and Tenten told each other as much on their ten-kilometre runs every morning, headbands nestled in equally straight bangs and Lycra pulled taut. And so he turned to Ino with a smile a few degrees short of _“chilly,”_ setting his chin in his hands. “You aren’t here to talk about haircuts,” he hazarded. It wasn’t really a question, and Ino’s shrug wasn’t really an answer.

“I’m actually here to see Neji Hyuga,” she said, at last. “Tenten said that he lived here. And, uh, my _mom_ said he was at the morgue last night.”

Too slowly, Lee realised that while the pinafore Ino hid under her denim jacket was a candy-striper’s uniform, the key card around her neck proclaimed she had full employee access to the local hospital. The Yamanaka family had medical legacy on the West coast, after all: he should have realised that their dealings with the morgue would hardly stay between them and the temp the Council had steered them toward.

“Ease up there, Lee,” Ino pressed on, “‘cause you look like a Quaker in a titty bar. I’m not, like, _mad_, don’t worry. Sakura and I are actually really grateful to you guys, for, you know . . . taking this seriously.”

“Quakers are respectable people,” murmured Lee, “and I’m sure even their conservative religious worldview allows them to sympathise with sex workers’ needs and rights to unions.” The words were wooden; his heart wasn’t in it. It had been one thing for Sakura to approach Tenten with fears something occult had played into Sasuke Uchiha’s head showing up on her doorstep. But with Ino in his kitchen, all Lee could think of was the horseshoes above their doorways and the way they pointedly never left their keys on the table, and the way the great wooden crucifix on the wall was sharpened to a deadly point. “Neji’s not here,” he finally blurted out. The smile he offered Ino was one he imagined as a fresh coat of charm over any unpleasantness – to which Ino’s cold stare was paint thinner, and her slack jaw all too evident a testament to a mood that was harder to hide than Lee had hoped.

“I can see that,” she said, stiffly. Her chair scraped against the linoleum as she pushed to her feet once more. “I’ll, um, be off. Tell him I say hi. And tell both he and Tenten that I brought you guys . . . these.” She fished through her pockets for a moment before procuring three folded cards, all stamped with the local nightclub’s logo and an embossed_ “VIP.”_ “I’m throwing a party at EoScene on Friday night,” she went on. “To sort of help Sakura and Naruto and everyone, like . . . move on from the whole Sasuke thing.”

“That’s really nice of you, Ino.” This time, Lee did mean it – though neither his smile nor hers quite reached their eyes. Even with the watery spring sunlight peeking through the cloud cover, there was no hiding that Kurama still teetered on the edge of a storm. “We’ll be there.”

The wall phone rang within seconds of Lee paging Tenten, and he could hardly help but grin as her voice crackled over the earpiece, bright with a telltale caffeination. “I hope I’m not disturbing,” he told her, and he could hear her laugh.

_ “Believe me,”_ groaned Tenten, _“it’s _welcome_. Neji said he’d come with me to Starbucks, but so far, he’s spent my entire coffee break debating me on whether or not vampires can get erections.”_

“They can’t!” Lee spoke without hesitation. “Their pulses are too slow. Everyone knows that!”

_“That’s what I said! But he insists that since they’re diseased _human_ corpses, with enough blood in their systems, they could. I told him he was welcome to find out for himself.”_

“Tell him to use protection, in that case,” said Lee, after shaking the image from his mind. “HIV is a blood-borne disease, after all.”

He was only half joking, and judging by the way the static over the line crackled around the beep of Tenten adding more coins to the payphone, Lee figured his friend knew it. _“What’s up?” _she finally asked. _“Is everything okay on the home front?”_

“Of course,” Lee scrambled to assure her. “No, I, ah, was wondering if we were all down to go clubbing Friday night.”

_ “‘Clubbing?’ Why?”_

“To live while we’re young?” Lee hoped Tenten could hear his smile, if not the way it made his cheeks cramp. “Fine,” he relented, “Ino Yamanaka invited us to a Very Important Party. Naruto and Sakura will both be there – and besides, VIP lounge or no, EoScene is a hotbed for vamps. I don’t think the dry spell we’ve been having covers Friday nights at the club.”

_ “You have a point,”_ said Tenten. Her second sigh lasted so long Lee almost feared he’d lost connection with her. But when she spoke once more, her voice was bright again. _“We’ll go,”_ she decided. _“But can I wear your new jacket? The one with the fringe?”_

“Tenten, we’re going out and _fighting vampires_,” Lee chided her. “Of course you can wear my jacket.”

In the end, though, Tenten had decided against the jacket: Friday night had brought with it a new wave of humidity, and neither of them felt like the mist outside, or their leaky bottles of holy water _inside_, would have bidden well for all that fringe. Instead, a legion of stakes wrapped tight against her person helped Tenten ensure her silk blouse was _just _loose enough where it tucked into her jeans, and Lee had been delighted to find that keeping the holy water in flasks at his waist didn’t upset the fall of his very greenest sweater. In a town of eight thousand people, the VIP lounge at a nightclub was as close as anyone was going to get to red-carpet glamour – which meant that for the eager Slayer, dressing up was yet another survival sport. There were few texts Lee took quite as seriously as he did the Slayers’ handbook, but that night, _Teen Vogue_ was one of them.

Only Neji seemed not to have gotten the message. His long hair was brushed into a strict centre part, and the most _exciting_ thing Lee could notice about their Watcher’s outfit was that the beads along the chain to his glasses matched the tiny chevrons of his tie.

“You look . . . formal,” said Lee, as Neji hovered by the door to Tenten’s dorm room. She was more direct.

“You _look_ like a substitute teacher who washes his hands with strawberry milk,” she snapped. “You _are _aware that we’re going to a real party, right? Not an ‘office’ party?”

“‘Hello’ to you too, Tenten,” grumbled Neji. “I suppose that tone means _you two _are aware that we aren’t going there _to_ party? That we have an investigation to carry out?”

“You should ditch the tie” was all Lee offered, and Tenten was quick to undo it from around Neji’s neck when he refused to act on the prompt himself.

If the legions of flickering streetlights and the barbed wire around warehouse fences were anything to go by, the industrial district housing the EoScene club was the one that the elderly town council would have known as the_ “bad part of town.”_ Though it was scarcely two blocks away from Main Street, and the good part of town, the difference was palpable: Lee rather felt as though the sticky spring air had taken on a new sort of chill as they wandered down the cracked tarmac, and the echoes of every kicked can or crushed shard of glass seemed to reach all the way to the marrow of his bones. Most jarring, though, was the way the streets came to life like a pop-up book as they rounded the corner away from tenement buildings and garages to EoScene’s home block. All of a sudden, the night sky was alive with the glow of countless cigarettes, and even the litter lining the streets seemed brighter – and made of more expensive garbage. Lee had moved around enough to know that even if the inhabitants of the _“bad part of town”_ did not dare go out after dark, those unspoken rules did not apply to the rich or the young. And they doubly didn’t apply to the casual carelessness of those who were both.

The bouncer standing guard by the corrugated metal of the club’s door was burly in a way Lee knew meant he would go down hard in a fight, and he found himself forcing a smile to shake the thought from his head. Beside him, Tenten was running her hand over her face – and the thousand-yard stare no bouncer would trust at a party. Once more, only Neji was off the ball, rifling absentmindedly through his briefcase (his _briefcase_!) for his wallet.

“Can you cover me, Neji?” Lee piped up. “I’ve blown my allowance for the month.”

“Me, too,” said Tenten, her plastic smile taking on a genuine edge. “I’m broke.”

“What did you two even spend it all on?” demanded Neji. They spoke at the same time:

“Gave all my cash to a homeless woman” said Lee, as Tenten demurred, “Froot Loops.”

Even sixty dollars poorer, Neji moved with a cool confidence through the crush of people at the once-red carpet leading from the door. EoScene might have taken the _“grunge”_ trend far too literally, its floors suspiciously sticky with fluids Lee doubted were just booze and the exposed brick of its walls dotted with old gum, but Neji stalked past the bar with murder in his blind eyes. Perhaps that was why people scrambled to part before him – but Lee suspected it had more to do with the fact that he looked like an undercover cop.

They found Ino at the centre of the dancefloor, screaming herself hoarse to the band onstage. It was only after a moment that Lee realised the figure hanging off her arm was Sakura, shrunken and stiff in her flannel. Even the Manic-Panic pink of her hair seemed dulled. Sasuke might have been the one to die (again) but Sakura looked the corpse her friend’s boyfriend had never been.

“Thank you for coming,” trilled Ino, once the customary hugs _“hello”_ had been cleared away and Sakura had been given enough personal space to finish the lager in her hand. “Some turnout, right?”

Lee craned his head up to look around. Sure enough, he could see the glittering borders of VIP passes on almost everyone on the dancefloor around them; even beyond that, the mosh pit had taken on a life of its own, swiping out at every cymbal crash like a jilted alleycat. “It’s amazing, Ino,” he all but gushed, rigor mortis grin giving way to a real one as he took in the club all around them. “What, er, what do you think, Sakura?”

Sakura was slow to match his and Ino’s exuberance, but she softened all the same, laying her head on Ino’s shoulder. “I think we all needed this,” she admitted. “Honestly, the only people I’ve seen this week have been cops.”

_Bingo,_ thought Lee. He fixed Tenten with a pointed look, and she was quick to pounce, tone extrachipper and borderline stupid as she turned on Sakura.

“No way that’s awful! Gods, don’t they understand that you need your _space_?” Though the band’s eager rock had dissolved into a groaning ballad, Tenten still jumped with all her might, as though her very blood ran fizzy with energy drinks. There weren’t many areas where social climbing and Slaying really went hand-in-hand, but both Tenten and Lee were well-versed in the disarming power of chatter; indeed, barely a minute had passed before Sakura had taken both Tenten’s hands in hers, spinning her around with abandon.

“And it’s like, who even asked them for their input!” Sakura was crowing. “I bet the only reason those weirdo murderers even turned to me was because nobody knows where Naruto _lives_!”

“Totally!” It seemed the safest thing to say, but even as Lee pulled Neji along into a jig to match their friends’, he was sure to catch Tenten’s eye. Even if she wasn’t actively heading the investigation into a murdered vampiric crime boss herself, Ino had clearly had the same idea they had. Live music and liquor were, after all, great social lubricators.

Lee took Neji by the arm after a few more minutes of desperately inane conversation, voices hoarse from dancing around the subject of Sakura’s real relationship to Sasuke Uchiha. Once more, the crowd parted for the business casual hovering by Lee’s shoulder (abetted, this time, by Lee’s shoulders themselves, as he curled forward like a human bowling ball).

The VIP lounge took up all of what was left of the former warehouse’s crumbling second floor, the balcony’s jagged edges done up in rebar and girders in a way Lee supposed might have been postmodern. Still, Lee couldn’t be sure if the emptiness of those scattered armchairs spoke to the safety concerns of the gods-fearing citizens of Kurama, or if Ino had been stingier with her invites than she’d let on: For every cluster of people Lee had thought to be wielding VIP passes was a cloud of dust or an abandoned tray of drinks—

“Hold that thought,” said Lee to himself. Neji stiffened beside him, but Lee spared little sympathies as he rushed to the nearest table. As he’d suspected, the glasses littered around the nearest table hadn’t yet gone sticky or fogged up – details that might not have mattered if he hadn’t been able to see the crowd below them parting with even greater purpose than they had before.

“What is it?” demanded Neji, swiping at his eyes, as though it would help.

Wordlessly, Lee pointed, forgetting for a moment the gesture didn’t say much. But what was there to say? It wasn’t uncommon for someone to be making a beeline across a sticky dancefloor, too many happy pills in . . . but when the _“someone” _in question had opted for a full-bustled purple ball gown, sandy hair glittering with silver pins, Lee knew there were only so many conclusions to draw. As Lee watched the woman cut through the crowd, he was struck, for the first time in over a week, by a prickling fear: unspoken words like so many burrs in the dry expanse of his throat. All he could think to do was grab one of those shot glasses, and fling it, as best he could, to Tenten’s feet below.

It hit her on the head, but Lee would take what he got. Wildly, he signalled to himself, then the fire exit: _“I’m heading out,”_ he was telling her, before cutting himself off with a rapid stabbing motion. _“To kill a vampire.”_

He explained the situation to Neji as quickly as he could, though Lee feared his tone had all too brusquely crossed the threshold between _“terse”_ and _“rude.” _Still, he could not bound over that next threshold – a strip of caution tape under a plastic sheet of a door – quickly enough; his Reeboks were a blur beneath him as he flew down the emergency exit’s spiral stairs. He couldn’t have been a hundred percent certain where the vampire had been headed, but he knew they were a tidy people. They would not take their prey inside: think of the cleaning bills!

And sure enough, as Lee barrelled through the heavy metal door into the back lot of the club, he found the shadows were alive with movement – and that they were quite the only things that were. The woman in the ball gown had skidded to a halt by a trash bin overflowing with either human brains or old spaghetti (equally likely options, really) as she rounded the corner from the club’s front door. Across from the two of them, panting side by side, a stocky man in evening tails to match her gown had crowded over a huddled shape pressed against the Dumpster proper: a huddled shape whose tousled blond hair and orange baseball jersey all but screamed that Naruto Uzumaki _“wuz here.”_

“Step away, now.” If a Boy Scout smiled and whistled under all circumstances, Lee thought it might do well for a Slayer to do the same – though as he spread his arms nonthreateningly, he also reached for one of his flasks of holy water, dousing his free hand in the stuff. “We don’t want anyone getting— _hurt_!”

Lee was fast, but the woman in the gown was faster. As he moved to bring his fist connecting with the second vampire’s exposed neck, she reached gloved hands around his shoulder and wrenched back. Lee hoped he was only imagining the _“pop!”_ to follow – but the thought was dashed as the second vampire, chin dripping with blood, whirled on him to bring a knee to his stomach.

Lee dropped. It was all he could think to do: get as low to the ground as he could, sweeping his legs out to knock the vampires off balance. The stocky one went down hard, and Lee pounced – literally. He lunged to pin the man to the concrete by the padded seams of his shoulders, before reaching for the flash of holy water again, splashing it against his face.

“_Aaargh_!”

Even without his fangs out or his _“game face” _– monstrous features emerging like so many weeds from pavement when a vampire got going – on, the vampire did not make a pretty sight. His skin blistered where the water had hit it, and as tears dropped from his narrowed eyes, they steamed against his pasty skin. Lee had to bite his tongue to keep from recoiling, especially as the steam began to clear, and he could see the blood staining the vampire’s mouth was a curdled, crackling black.

He barely caught a glimpse of Naruto’s slumped form as he pulled away, but he saw enough to know he was unconscious. Lee could only hope that in this case, the word was not synonymous with “dead.” But once more, there was no time to ponder. This time, when he felt the fabric of the woman’s gloves against his neck, Lee tumbled back, keeping as low as he could the whole time – until he popped from his back to his hands, and pushed over to his feet once more, feeling the satisfying _“thwock!”_ of sneaker sole on skin as he kicked past the woman.

“Oh, you little—” Whatever she was going to say next, though, fell silent in her throat: as the tendons and muscles under that silk choker and heavy foundation strained to accommodate the shifting features of her face. The skin of her jaw seemed to come to life with a million squirming _somethings_ as it stretched over cracking bone, inch-long fangs slipping over splitting lips.

Lee _never _got tired of seeing that.

“I don’t scare easy, ma’am,” he began, stepping just close enough to see his reflection warp in her red-rimmed eyes; brown and green shapes distorting as she blinked, blinked, blinked. “But seeing what happened to your friend down there, you might want to consider whether you do.”

“_Alwayth_ with the monologuing,” rasped the vampire, lisping around new fangs as they filled the mouth of her true form. “Gaara _thaid_ you would be—”

Whatever or _who_ever a _“Gaara” _was, Lee supposed he would never know. He might not have had Tenten’s hand for the staking side of the business, but he lunged all the same, a white-knuckled grip around the length of driftwood he kept on his keychain. The vampire turned just in time, but Lee managed to rake a burning wound into the exposed skin of her clavicle. “Lay _off_ Uzumaki!” he found himself crying, bringing the keychain down on the vampire’s figure again. “He’s been through _enough_ this week!”

“That’s right, he has.”

This new voice was whisper-soft and impossibly loud, all at once: it was as though that rustling murmur was echoed in every gust of wind, rattling through the bare trees on the far block and blowing errant litter across the lot. To say it raised chills down his spine would, Lee felt, have been the understatement of the decade: it felt as though all the skin on the expanse of his back had begun to writhe, an army of icy-footed beetles marching in formation down the lining of his shirt . . .

. . . until the whole world seemed to come to a halt, the tip of a stake pressing against the small of his back just hard enough to draw blood.

“Lay _off_ Temari and Kankuro,” the voice was going on, in a cruel imitation of Lee’s own verve. He began inching his head around, but could only catch a glimpse of straggling red hair and icy-blue eyes before he was forced to his knees: this third party had driven the stake in _that _much further, and with that vampire strength behind it, the movement felt to Lee as a threat to break his spine clean in two.

“Because if you don’t,” said the stranger, “I will personally see to it your week is worse than even poor Naruto could ever imagine.”


	2. Creep

Of three things, Rock Lee could be certain.

Number one: between the stake digging into his back and the way the woman in the ball gown, Temari, had scrambled for the abandoned flask of holy water, the vampires must have thought Lee was one of them. Number two: Lee was not one of them, not even a little bit. And number three: even though he might not have been _un_-dead, one wrong move meant he could still very well end up _dead_-dead.

Every nerve in his body was screaming, every muscle taut, but Lee stood stock-still – even as his mind began to reel, thoughts shaking like an old train on older tracks as fear coursed through his system. _“Be smart,”_ Neji would have said. Useful advice, that: because while the nineteen-and-a-half year old wearing Lee’s favourite sweater and not-quite-spotless Reeboks wanted to wrench away, the fighter in him knew he couldn’t. Even a Slayer could never out-speed a vampire; this Gaara (for Lee figured that this must have been who that Temari had been talking about) would have driven the stake into his back before he could move, and likely used the momentum of Lee’s steps to do some _serious_ spinal damage.

_ Be smart, be smart, be smart. _Lee thinned his lips. He could feel the stake twisting into the wound it had already opened on his back, and his eyes swam with visions of splinters and tetanus and every other brochure he’d ever read at a doctor’s office – so he squeezed his eyes shut, and exhaled, sharply, to clear his head. Then he flung himself backwards.

_ “Thock!” _Lee had always found the sound of flesh hitting bone as one that was disgustingly soft, and he couldn’t imagine a universe wherein the stickiness sinking into his scalp at the impact point wasn’t equally horrid. But there was no time for damage control. He threw himself to the ground, rolling over his shoulder to the stretch where the last vamp, Kankuro, lay writhing. The boils on his face had begun to settle, but Lee knew the poor creature’s pain wasn’t over yet – he pulled Kankuro up by the wrist as he popped to his own feet, and pushed him like a battering ram over his accomplices, watching them topple in a heap of silk and whalebone.

From there, Lee saw the steps he needed to take like the onscreen cues of Dance Dance Revolution. Down! Up! Left! Roundhouse, haymaker, elbow! The dead may have had monstrous endurance (funny, how that worked) but Lee was a whirlwind, a blurry spiral of long limbs and bruised knuckles, and he wouldn’t relent. He _couldn’t_, not really. Naruto had already been unconscious when he’d burst to apprehend the vampires: he must already have been bitten, the neurotoxins from their fangs seeping slowly through his system. If that were the case, it was more imperative than ever Lee kept the vampires in motion, away from their mark.

“Enough!”

The vampire, Gaara’s voice was whisper-soft even in anger, but Lee could hardly help but feel the susurrus made a poor match to his features. The streetlights had caught his face in such a way he was all wide, hard angles and milky-white skin . . . milky-white skin, that was, that strained over a bulging upper jaw, muscles twitching where the feeding fangs had shot forward. Rotating teeth – like sharks’ – were only one of a range of mutations the vampiric virus, the Revenant Infectious Pathogen, imparted on its victims, but it was easily one of the most horrifying. Essentially, vampires grew a collapsible third jaw, and could break and re-seal the bones of their faces at will to push hollow fangs for feeding and venom injection out into their mouths. Nasty as it may have been, though, Lee took the scene in with wide eyes. Even for the undead, bones didn’t grow overnight. This crew must not only have been _dressing_ like they came from a bygone era: Lee could tell, by the shape of all the fangs he’d had the displeasure of seeing thus far, that there were centuries on those corseted bones.

He was so caught up in his forensics he barely noticed Gaara speaking again (the four punches he’d managed, in the interim, to land were thrown solely on instinct). “ . . . know what you’re trying,” Gaara was rasping, staggering backward: Lee had managed to get him in the kneecap, and he favoured his right leg now as he moved. “But you don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

Lee rolled his lips. It wasn’t, he’d decided, that Gaara was all that quiet: rather, he spoke with a soft Southern drawl, those long vowels and dropped consonants settling like so much sand over his words. “All I see is a couple of bloodsuckers who talk and dress like they didn’t get the memo we _abolished slavery_,” he scoffed at last. He spoke in his best Tenten: all huffy breathing and half-lidded eyes, daring his opponents to rise to a challenge he could only hope to end with his fists (and a big wooden stake).

Still, he’d picked the wrong time to grandstand. All three of the vampires had made it to their feet, and they moved around him in a slow, decisive circle; Lee was inclined to think of sharks once more, and of himself as chum. The second part of the analogy seemed especially apt. All three vampires had their fangs out, now, and they seemed to vibrate like ringing phones as they bounced on the balls of their feet, just too fast for Lee to pick out their movements for what they were. He was good – he _knew_ he was good – but how long could one human stand against three vampires, Slayer or no?

Lee knew what he was supposed to do. He was _supposed _to call for help: make as much noise as possible, to distract the vampires until backup came. But Naruto was still slumped in a pile behind him, and there was no way of knowing how long it’d take Tenten to make it outside to help him – if she heard him at all.

So Lee took a slow, steady breath. There were any number of lessons he might have recalled, then, a range of old voices he might have heard, but only one mattered. Even with his toes curled all the way into the soles of his sneakers and a bevy of vampires staring him down, Lee was eight years old again, hanging uneasily from the high bar as Gai grinned up at him.

_ “Go big to go home,” _he’d said. Lee remembered frowning.

_ “Sir—” _because he’d still called him “sir,” then _“—isn’t the expression go big ‘or’ go home?”_

_ “Not today, boy.” _Gai had beamed as he shook his head. _“I’m not letting you down until you impress me. So _go big_.”_

Once more, Lee dove . . . but not for any of the vamps. There was a streetlamp some thirty paces ahead of him, and Lee latched his legs around it as he leapt, scrambling upward like a pole dancer on Benzedrine – and swung. The kip vaulted him like a bullet back down toward the asphalt, but he never made contact with it. Instead, he slammed into Gaara’s thin frame with all his might, hooking his ankles around the worn silk of his waistcoat. Lee watched his knees buckle as Gaara struggled to keep upright, keep from bringing thirteen stone crashing down on his spine and ribs. Lee, for his part, knew wouldn’t stay put long. Digging his knees in for vantage, he twisted to drive a punch into the back of Gaara’s neck – and when his hands flew up on instinct, Lee grabbed for the stake the vampire still clutched tight.

“Any last words?”

Lee wasn’t usually one for quips – and indeed, as Gaara stumbled forward, swinging him loose at last, Lee couldn’t think of anything else to say. So instead, he whirled on his heel lunged, squeezing his eyes shut in preparation for the cloud of ash the vampire would become . . .

. . . or, the cloud of ash the vampire _should_ have become. But when Lee opened his eyes once more, Gaara was still right in front of him, and the stake was quivering where Lee had jammed it into his chest, a neat black bloodstain stretching slowly across the waistcoat’s silk brocade.

“I’ll leave the quips to you, sir.” Gaara’s fangs jut out over his lip as he scowled, but his expression was steady, eyes blank as he ripped the stake from his chest. Lee felt his stomach sink. “Now, whoever you are . . . ”

_ “Whoever” _Lee was, he knew he’d run out of options. Pouring on one final burst of speed, Lee darted across the courtyard to heft Naruto’s dozing form into a fireman’s carry, and he ran.

“It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Tenten’s voice wobbled even through the collar of her hoodie, pulled high around her face, and out of the corner of his eye, Lee could see her knuckles were white around the hilt of her stake. She’d mimed out the stab, as Lee had described it to her, a thousand times now, but each one was a little weaker. “It just . . . ” she began again. “Agh!”

Neji had let them decorate his bedroom door however they wanted, proclaiming it made no difference to him, anyhow. This was why the entire expanse of wood was covered by a life-sized poster of Tsunade Senju, the star of _Baywatch _– who now had a twelve-inch stake sticking from the centre of her forehead, where Tenten had thrown it. When she stalked over to the door to pull it out, Lee noticed the while tear left in the poster was small and neat, the gouge in the wood beneath it ran half an inch deep.

“We have to think logically,” he chided her. Then, when she didn’t react, Lee tried again. “_Hey_!”

“‘Hey’ yourself, Boy Meets World!” cried Tenten, whirling on him. Her dark eyes glittered in the dim light of the hallway, and her lips were pressed thin, white patches dancing across their shapes as she spoke. “Lee,” she relented, “you staked a vampire and he _survived_. I don’t think freaking out is too unrealistic, you know? I think I’m actually quite _entitled_ to some freakage!”

When Lee slumped against the wall, he could feel the edges of each vertebra grind against the weathered plaster,and how they _“cre-ea-eak”_ed as he pulled himself straighter. Tenten was right. They’d been stalking the West Coast for wights and the walking dead since they were sixth graders, and Lee was just naïve enough to think that they’d seen it all by this point. But even the strangest of cultists or most grotesque creatures of the deep were to fall, eventually, to Slayer weapons and Watcher logic: never before had Lee brushed against an adversary whose demise hadn’t been plotted to the letter in one of Neji’s countless grimoires. It wasn’t often he let the fleeting worries of his job solidify into real fear, but now, the image of that treacly blood and the stark absence of ash had been carved deeper into his mind than even that new cut in Neji’s door. Dread made a heavy mantle – and it was one that _so_ didn’t go with his outfit.

So Lee tried for a smile, and he hoped Tenten couldn’t see how wooden it was. “So,” he began, rifling desperately through the blurred shadows of their cramped apartment for a distraction, a change of topic, “you’re . . . ah . . . I like your bracelet!”

Lee’s voice shot up at the end of the sentence, and the jutting octave drove his smile into the pin corners of a grimace. Still, it did the trick: he watched Tenten deflate against the wall across from him, and her expression softened as she drew her hand closer to her face, winding the bangle around her wrist. “Yeah,” she said, voice small. Then she rolled her eyes. “But don’t get cute on me, Lee. It was just a birthday present.”

“Neji didn’t get _me _an antique piece of jewellery for my birthday,” Lee shot back, folding his arms across his chest. “And he definitely didn’t drive me to a restaurant two cities over to take me out to fancy dinner.”

“That’s just because twenty’s more of a milestone than nineteen is. You’ll get yours next year.”

Lee rather felt that with all the times he’d looked death in the eye to even _make_ it to nineteen, that any birthday, by this point, was a milestone. But he wouldn’t press the subject. As far as he was concerned, Neji and Tenten were welcome to their perpetual quadrille, just as he was to his never-ending game of _“will they or won’t they;”_ Tenten stood just a little straighter now that they had both fallen silent, and that was all Lee really cared about.

Still, Lee felt a flood of relief course through his system when the huge Tsunade poster finally shifted with the twisting doorknob, and as Neji finally beckoned them inside.

His room was as small as anything in that apartment, but with a labyrinth of textbooks and tomes pressed against black-painted walls and with the curtains drawn tight, Neji’s bedroom seemed especially cramped: it felt to Lee as though his each breath came shallower as he pressed on – even though Neji’s room was, by all accounts, a lot less stuffy than Gai’s (who enjoyed a liberal and generous relationship with Axe body spray). Still, Lee would never dare complain. He was happy Neji had at least one space where he didn’t need to hide behind those sunglasses, and where he wasn’t functionally blind – and if that meant that Lee would grin and bear stubbed toes and Tenten’s elbows constantly in his midsection, grin and bear he would.

“Ow! That was my foot, Lee!”

“Sorry! Do you want to step on _my_ foot to make it equal?”

“That wouldn’t fix anything,” groused Tenten, bringing her heel smashing down on Lee’s toes. He hoped Neji – in his element at last – wouldn’t see how they both hobbled to perch on his bed.

Neji was by far the tallest of the shadowy pillars in the dim, and a rustling of fabric at Lee’s eye level told him his friend was folding his arms, gearing up for the debrief. The dark eddied slightly on the wall behind him, where thin lines of grey chalk stretched across chemical reactions and calculations crawling with foreign letters and symbols. Though Slaying had remained largely unchanged since antiquity, an ancient art even before the great Professor van Helsing organised their ranks, the Watchers’ trade was constantly evolving. Taxonomy and naturalism had lent themselves easily to declassifying old folk tales, and the inventions of nifty things like microscopes and espresso machines meant researchers and Watchers alike had armouries of tools at their disposal to identify the science behind the supernatural. Neji himself had finished a Masters’ degree in pathology when he was only sixteen, and he was working now, four years later, to develop a countering agent to the RIP’s effects.

Granted, he worked just as doggedly now at standing upright, and Lee felt himself pull a sympathetic grimace as Neji let out an enormous yawn. “Thanks for waiting, you two,” he managed at last, setting either a stick of chalk or a really stale Twizzler down on his desk with a soft thud. “I needed some space to think.”

“And?” prompted Tenten, to a chorus of rustling fabric as she settled in on the bedclothes. “Did you manage any . . . thinking?”

“Not that you aren’t a great thinker,” Lee scrambled to add, “and a brilliant Watcher.” But even though fatigue had raised barbs across even the most mundane sentences, it had also settled over the room like so much un-spun cotton, snagging on clipped words and crackling voices, and softening them. Neji barely stirred at the words. Instead, he fumbled around on his desk for a moment, and Lee waited in practiced silence for a tiny orange flare to leap against the wick of afoul-smelling Yankee candle.

“Let’s recap” was all Neji said in response to either of them. The flame barely spluttered as he lifted the candle to some of the drawings on the chalkboard-paint of his wall: he’d always had steady hands. Lee narrowed his eyes to focus through the glare, and couldn’t help but smile as he saw that nestled between two detailed diagrams of human and vampire hearts was a cartoonish drawing of a figure with heavy fringe and great angry squiggles for eyebrows stabbing a stick-figure vampire through the heart. If he knew Neji – which, after so many years on the lam with him, Lee figured he did – the drawing was for his and Tenten’s sake. _“I can be fun, too!”_ Neji was urging them.

But when oh-so-fun Neji spoke once more, his tone was somber. “Staking a vampire,” he said, passing Tenten the candle so he could spread his hands. “It’s one of the oldest tricks in the Slayers’ book – and with good reason. It’s the easiest way to overload their chakras, after all.”

_ “Chakras.” _In older days, and in different cultures, it might have been known as something else: the soul, the _ka_, the aether. Whatever one called it, though, the terms all boiled down to the same essential concept. In every living cell of every living thing in the world, energies sparked in millions of tiny reactions – but contrary to what the chemists of the earlier twentieth century had dismissed as folly, life force wasn’t _only_ chemical. What Slayers and Watchers knew as _“chakra” _was the energy that made a living thing capable of thought and dreams and love: it was, at its core, supernatural and _super natural_, all at once.

But however it worked, the Revenant Infectious Pathogen destroyed a body’s capability to process chakra. And to drive anything brimming with that organic energy – from ornate bone daggers to twigs pulled from tangles in Tenten’s hair – through the heart of a vampire, an organ no longer capable of generating all that energy, was the most surefire way to kill it. Their systems overloaded – hence, Lee found himself musing, the combustion, and the ash.

“Ri-i-ight.” Tenten’s drawl was muffled once more, this time by a weathered stuffed bear she’d picked up to play with, but it was still loud enough to pull Lee from his reverie. “Only, Neji,” she was saying, “their chakras weren’t overloaded. They were distinctively _under_loaded.”

Even through the gloom, Lee could see Neji shrug. “My leading theory is that somehow, that Gaara guy – the one you said had the stake, Lee – he must’ve treated the wood somehow. A resin, or some kind of organic insulator . . . in theory, there’s a million ways he could have blocked the chakra sites of his heart from contact with the stake.”

“‘In theory?’” echoed Lee. It wasn’t the bait he was supposed to rise to, but he plastered a smile across his face all the same, hoping it coloured his voice.

Neji’s voice was ashen in more than just tone, by contrast. “Yes,” he said, tightly, “in ‘theory.’ I’ve been poring over every text we have about the properties _and_ folklore of chakra, but so far, I haven’t found anything to suggest there’s any physical substances that can keep any deplete chakra sites from combusting, much less a vampire’s heart.”

His pause was pointed, and his delicate features were drawn in the flickering candlelight, lips thin and cool stare set deep into high cheekbones._ His heart, his heart, his heart._ Could Lee have _missed_? He supposed it wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility: of the two of them, Tenten was the Slayer with precision and grace, and Lee was the one they rolled out when they needed a cannonball. A bruiser.

But Neji wasn’t talking about the roles they’d delegated in the team. He was talking about Isobu, a tiny town on the border between Konoha and Kiri, and about Rin Nohara – and her empty grave, where Lee had—

_ Where “Lee had” moved on, _Lee told himself firmly. _There’s no point in dwelling. _The joints cracking in his hands as he clenched his fists were sounds he told himself acted rather as punctuation. They were also rather the only sounds he could hear. Neji had fallen quiet, shadowy contours hardened along tense shoulders and bristling elbows, his arms locked tightly across his chest; Lee, for his part, hardly dared to breathe, letting the murk of the room and the miasma of that scented candle (seriously, what was that, vanilla and _carrion_?) settle over his chest, pressing his ribs in, in, in. He shook his head hard to clear it, and watched as the gesture sent the candle’s flame leaping.

“Maybe we’re overthinking this,” said Tenten, the brightness to her voice all fluorescent artifice. She still held Neji’s stuffed bear, but the warm tan of her skin had lightened to stark white splotches at her knuckles and gone red at her fingertips: the poor bear was one broached comment away, Lee knew, from having its head ripped off. “There’s loads of reasons this might have gone wrong, right? Maybe . . . maybe the guy’s heart was on the _wrong side_, like yours is, Lee.” Lee found his hands straying to his chest: to the right side, where his heart was, sure enough, on the wrong side – and then to the left, where a web of scar tissue stretched across a bullet wound only a freak of nature would have been able to survive. “Or,” Tenten was barreling on, “maybe they weren’t vampires!”

“I like that!” Lee was quick to latch onto the lifeline, old scars and older shames forgotten, if for the moment. “_Yama_, _empousai_ . . . aren’t there loads of demons with, uh, fangs?”

“Would explain why the holy water still worked, too,” Tenten pointed out. Once more, the Watchers had debunked the role of religion in that particular method of vampire Slaying: most _“holy” _water came from aquifers deeply saturated with volatile chemicals, which were quick to react when they came into contact with the deficient chakra of anything undead. It was effective enough, but Lee was pretty sure they’d be just as dangerous wielding flasks of battery acid.

“Sure.” Neji’s voice was small when he spoke at last, and the bones of his back scraped weakly against the wall as he slumped to the floor. “Maybe they weren’t vampires. Maybe we’re beset by a new undead plague. Maybe – just maybe – an entirely _different_ group of demons chased our _only_ real lead on the Sasuke case out into an alleyway to try to drink his blood, for entirely _non_-vampiric reasons.”

“Now you’re getting it,” Lee told him.

There wasn’t much room in the heavy air for a new hush to settle over their group, but Lee welcomed it anyway: letting the tension of their shared uncertainty settle over him like a heavy embrace, or perhaps one of those as-seen-on-TV weighted blankets. It wasn’t long until Neji drifted to join them, long legs dangling off the bedframe; they were a pile of sore limbs and slumping postures as they curled up on the thin mattress together, which they were all far too old and tall to still get away with. Even so, sleep came quickly enough – despite the fact that Tenten had wedged Lee halfway into the corner in her haste to let Neji lay his head on her chest, and that Lee found himself using Neji’s bony knees as a pillow – and Lee found his night was welcomingly dreamless, in that way that only sore muscles promised it would be.

He was the first to wake up in the morning – or, rather, the morning proper, once the navies and cobalts of the dawn had ceded to another overcast day, blue skies a hoax in the midday light. Whichever it was, Lee moved on autopilot, padding softly to Gai’s room and helping him into his wheelchair, forcing the same smile he always did. “Morning,” he told Gai, leaning over the back of the wheelchair to give his foster father a kiss on top of his head. Gai’s was a smile that belonged (and had once been) on cereal boxes nationwide.

“Sleep well?” he wanted to know. Lee shrugged.

“Like the dead,” he decided; then, “Or, at least, the way we all wish the dead would do.”

Gai gave the old shaman’s amulet around his neck a reassuring pat. Lee tried not to look at the stark absence of his legs. The routine was an old one, by now, and Lee felt it carved just as deeply into his bones as Gai did – though, of course, Gai did not have quite as many bones anymore.

“Up-up-up! That’s not breakfast.”

The morning paper had provided Lee and Gai with any number of conversation topics as they settled in for their scrambled eggs, but the chatter seemed inane as Lee heard Gai’s voice deepen; watched him straighten against the back of his wheelchair to turn a disapproving stare on Tenten as she wandered to the pantry.

“What?” Her voice was heady around a mouthful of old Pop-Tart, and the stale pink frosting broke off in shards as she toyed with the last of the pastry.

“You heard him,” said Lee, jabbing his fork toward her. “You have to eat your proteins, Tenten.”

“Suck-up,” she admonished. She flashed Gai an indulgent smile as he wheeled back from the stove with a plateful of eggs for her – but the look she turned on Lee as she crumbled the other half of her Pop-Tart like sprinkles over her plate was anything but.

“I don’t know whether to call _Food Network_ or the cops.” When Neji emerged from his room at last, he looked almost presentable, tinted spectacles pushed high on his nose and a clean shirt pulled over slacks that didn’t look like they’d seen the business end of a vampire in at least a few weeks. The only visible evidence to his night spent as a little spoon in the world’s most disorganised cutlery drawer was his hair: he’d brushed most of it into waist-length plaits, but dark shocks of it stood up from his brow at odd angles like a half-bloomed dandelion. Still, he was cool and poised as he swept past Tenten’s seat, and his smile was coy as he moved to hug Gai _“good morning”_ and clap Lee on the back. “Seriously, Tenten,” he went on, “that’s straight nasty.”

“‘Straight nasty?’ Did you get that from the new Salt-N-Pepa CD, Preppy Longstocking, or did you pick that up at the club last night?” Tenten wielded spite with the same deadly force she did the stake, and Lee found himself quailing under a glare not even directed at him as she took another bite of her Pop-Tart _“omelette.”_

Neji sniffed delicately, and he swilled the protein shake Lee poured for him round in his novelty _Baywatch_ mug as though it were a fine cabernet. “Purple!” was all he said, giving Lee a flickering half-smile. “You know that’s my favourite flavour of protein powder.”

“Was that sarcasm, boy?” Gai arched heavy eyebrows, and Neji shrugged, cryptic as ever.

It was nearly midday by the time Lee and Tenten managed to pull on their running shoes and race down the stairs, to Gai’s typical shouts of encouragement and a muttered _“Don’t get killed”_ from Neji, ever supportive. Their first three kilometres were peppered with mindless comments on weathering the weather and summer break plans, but they fell silent as they reached the outskirts of town, and the Lee felt the hush sour on his tongue as they bounded past the Kurama town sign – and as his gaze skipped over a crude drawing scrawled over its proclamation of _“Population: 8,761.” _The stick-figure drawing of the mayor (with _very _enhanced genitalia) might have belonged to any of the town’s residents, but a crude message in the indigenous language of Uzushio was clue enough as to who’d written the graffiti – even before Lee’s gaze fell on Naruto’s signature.

“Did he make it home okay, do you think?” Lee called. Tenten was half a league ahead of him, by then, but she skidded to a halt to call back.

“Who?”

“Naruto,” said Lee, breaking into a jog once more to catch up with her. He’d doubled back on the club some time before dawn to prop a still-sleeping Naruto up against a bathroom stall, and Tenten had told Sakura that her friend had passed out after ten some-odd shots of the house special (which was either moonshine or rat poison). Sakura had promised to take him home, but it was a promise she’d made on wobbly legs, too, speech slurred.

“I hope so,” said Tenten. “I told Sakura to call when she heard from— oh!”

Sure enough, as soon as she said it, the little red light on her pager began to blink, and the overcast sky was just dark enough for Lee to see Sakura’s phone number flashing across the screen even in direct _“sunlight.” _“Speak of the Devil,” drolled Tenten, unclipping the pager from her belt, “and she shalt appear.”

“Oh, Tenten,” sighed Lee. He was quick to draw the sign of the pentagram across his chest, one of those general good-luck wards for when someone invoked the Dark Lady’s name. “Don’t.”

The county reservation was a two-hour drive from Kurama town limits, but it took only a fraction of that time for suburbia to melt into wilderness: tidy asphalt roads dissolving into hard-packed soil and grasses stretching like some great stormy sea, sharp green stalks crashing over traffic barriers like so many waves. Lee longed to tumble from their rented Jeep to run through that grass – to spin around, _Sound of Music_-style, and maybe pick some wildflowers – but he had long since been quarantined to the back seat: last summer’s Lilith Fair had taught Neji, stepping in as their navigator, that Lee was far from road trip material.

To be fair, none of them were. Neji’s feat were up on the dashboard – but not so far up on the dashboard he risked getting Cheeto dust on his loafers, or actual Cheetos anywhere near anyone who might have wanted him to share. Tenten, for her part, was as blind as Neji was as she screwed her eyes shut to croon along to the radio, jerking the steering wheel back and forth in time with the beat.

“It’s like ra-a-ain on your wedding day! It’s a free ri-i-ide, when you’ve already paid!” crowed Tenten. “It’s the good advice— _whoa_!”

The seat belt snapped like a whip against Lee’s chest as the car swerved wildly to the side – but he couldn’t complain. Craning his neck to see past Tenten, knuckles white against the steering wheel, Lee could just catch a glimpse of an enormous dog bounding across the road, and of a wiry figure sprinting after it.

“Akamaru! Come _back_!”

“Everything all right, there, buddy?”

Lee was the first to spill from the car, and the dirt of the road billowed around his sneakers as his feet hit the ground. “Can we help you with anything?” he pressed on, spreading his hands. He barely caught a glimpse of a scowling face under a flash of red beanie before he was bowled over, though, head slamming back against the car door as that dog knocked him clean over.

“Ah, great.” The stranger’s voice was dry and prickly, and he kept his hands on his hips as he stalked over to the car. “Akamaru,” he said once more, “heel.”

The dog did nothing of the sort, black eyes unblinking as it pressed its cold, wet nose against Lee’s forehead. Lee, for his part, sat as still as he could, heart hammering in his chest. He could see his reflection, wide-eyed and gaping, in the dog’s blank gaze, and he swallowed hard as he backed against the car.

“You don’t have to look so scared, you know. Rez dogs don’t bite.” The stranger closed thin arms around the dog’s midsection to half-haul, half-drag it away from the car, and Lee scrambled to his feet. Even as he stood, the dog stood taller than his waist, and its short white fur seemed matted with something other than dirt. _That one definitely does,_ he thought. But he straightened all the same, meeting the young man’s eye. “Thanks for the help,” he managed, at last. The stranger scoffed.

“No apology?”

“Excuse me?” Tenten was glaring as she popped her head out of the driver’s-side window. “Your dog attacked our friend!”

“You nearly ran him over!” the young man protested. “And he only ran into the road in the first place because he heard the car.”

“I’m sorry, should we have _walked_ here?”

The young man looked like he very much thought they should have – if they were to show up at the rez at all – but this time, Lee was quick to cut in. “We’re very sorry, to both you and your dog,” he said, as calmly as he could. (Gods, but that was a huge dog.) (With huge teeth.) “You wouldn’t happen to live here, would you?”

“Sure, let me just get my tribal ID,” sneered the young man. “What are you guys, the feds?”

Lee felt his tongue twist into his cheek. He knew where his sympathies were supposed to lie: knew that the sight of crushed beer cans and empty syringes dotted like moth-holes through the unkempt grasses ought to have instilled a great deal more patience for this stranger’s attitude than he actually felt, given what he knew of the hardships he no doubt faced on the reservation. But that didn’t mean the thought of socking him across the jaw and giving him to the dog as a chew toy didn’t feel really, really tempting.

“We’re friends of Naruto’s,” Lee lied, at last, as Tenten and Neji came to hover by either side of him. “We wanted to make a house call – he got pretty wasted at the club last night, and we wanted to double check he made it home okay. It’s an awful long trip from Kurama.”

“If you’re his friends, how come you’ve never come by before?” the stranger wanted to know. When had Tenten found her comeback, she’d already brushed past him, dust milling in clouds at her heels.

“Probably ‘cause we didn’t want you to sick that mutt on us, dude. Keep it on a damn leash, would you? Seriously—” here, she turned to glare over her shoulder, beckoning Lee and Neji forward “—I’m pretty sure _Old Yeller _wasn’t a self-help book!”

“It _did_ end with a very pro-dog sentiment,” Lee hissed to her, as they wandered past a dilapidated street sign. “The dog had puppies before it died, and they brought the family together.”

Tenten rolled her eyes. “Shut up, nerd.”

A handful of more helpful townspeople wound up pointing them in the right direction, and soon enough, Lee found himself at the centre of their little phalanx, hovering on the edge of a set of porch stairs. He might have knocked, if he’d thought the old door to the house could take it – but in truth, the house looked just dead as anything did, this far outside of town. It was only one storey, and set deep into the clumpy grass, which was blue-green under the dew. Once upon a time, it might have been a sprawling affair, but now, the house seemed almost sick: the walls caved ever so slightly inward and the porch roof sagged, as though the whole thing was just waiting for their request for sick leave to be approved, and to succumb at last to the dryrot.

When the door did open, swinging inward, Lee’s stomach lurched, heart scrambling back onto its beat. “Naruto!” he squeaked, to a chorus of similar sentiments from Tenten and Neji. “We were just . . . uh . . . ”

“You’re paying a house call. I know. Inuzuka told me.”

“‘Inuzuka?’ Is that the guy with the dog?”

Naruto had fair hair and dark colouring, which meant his sandy eyebrows were all but invisible against the rich brown of his skin; the only indication Lee had to his incredulous gaze was the contempt in his steely-blue eyes. “Kiba Inuzuka,” he confirmed. “And aside from him, half the aunties on the rez phoned ahead to say that there was a car coming up the road. We don’t get a lot of visitors.”

“Well . . . here we are! Surprise!” Lee tried for a disarming smile. “I’m Lee, and this is Tenten and Neji. We’re friends of Ino Yamanaka’s, and—”

Naruto slammed the door shut so quickly even Lee, with over a decade of Slaying under a bright orange para-cord he was using as a belt, barely had time to react. It was Neji who surged forward, wedging his foot across the threshold just in time.

“We’re not here for Ino’s sake,” he said, not unkindly. “We’re here about Sasuke Uchiha.”

Naruto’s sneer was a full-body movement, his shoulders curling just as his lip did. “Of course you are,” he spat. “Well, unless you brought me an edible arrangement to express your sorrows or brought _him _back to life—”

“He was never alive.” This time, Tenten was the one to cut him off, and she didn’t spare any breath for Neji’s silky-smooth pleasantries. “And we think you knew that.”

Naruto narrowed his eyes, but he made no moves for the door: neither wrenching it open once more nor pulling it the last of the way shut. “There’s a lot of people, asking me a lot of questions about Sasuke,” he finally relented. “Why? Why should I be responsible?”

“You were his boyfriend,” said Lee, slowly. “You knew him best—”

“I didn’t ‘know’ _shit_, Eyebrows McGee!” snapped Naruto. “So how about you take Posh and Sporty Spice back to Kurama, and tell Ino and Sakura I don’t want them digging? Or better yet, why don’t you all just leave me alone?” He threw his hands up, hapless. “I lost the man I loved,” he began, but before he could finish, Lee was crying out:

“Well, he didn’t love _you_! They don’t love anything! They don’t have souls—”

“Lee!” Tenten’s grip was a vice around his arm, and there was an unspoken warning in her dark eyes: _“Don’t go there,”_ she seemed to say. But he had – and when Lee lifted his gaze to meet Naruto’s once more, he saw a single tear snaking down his face . . .

. . . and staining his collar, just below two faded scars in his jugular vein. They’d scarcely be visible without the collar’s shadow catching on the white tissue, and even with the stark contrast, the scars were small enough to go unnoticed entirely. So unless Naruto – a scrawny rez kid whose house was falling apart – had somehow gained access to cosmetic surgery to cover up the wounds, nobody had drunk his blood in a long, long while.

“They didn’t feed on you,” Lee blurted out. Naruto narrowed his eyes, and Lee pressed on: “The vampires you were with at EoScene, last night. They didn’t feed on you.”

It seemed impossible. Naruto had been out cold, and the stockier man’s, Kankuro’s, face had been stained with blood even before the holy water began digging pocks into his flesh – but here Naruto was, unscathed.

Lee found himself on the edge of the reservation almost by accident: he scarcely remembered leaving Tenten and Neji with Naruto, or wandering into the scrubland. But by now, the waist-high grasses had condensed into bushes and shrubs, and willows cast long, soft shadows over the endless green waves. “I know you’re here,” he hazarded, cupping his hands around his mouth. “I know you’re watching Naruto Uzumaki!”

It was almost a full minute before a figure did melt from the trees. He might have traded the coat and tails for a more casual – if no less dated – set of tweed jodhpurs and a bolo tie, and folded the fangs back into his jaw, but after trying and failing to kill him in a back alleyway, Lee rather felt that he would recognise Gaara anywhere.

“You came.” Gaara’s accent seemed all the more Southern in the wilderness, even if willow trees and silver skies were a far cry from tumbleweeds and dust storms. “I wasn’t sure you would.”

“I wasn’t sure I’d ever ask questions first, and stake later,” Lee shot back. “But here I am.”

“Gods, thanks for telling me. I’d barely noticed, you know,” deadpanned Gaara. His face was icy and impassive, blue eyes blown into overexposure by his pale features. His red curls were straggly and bright, but much like Naruto, it didn’t translate to brows or lashes: Gaara seemed like a sketch of a person – well, vampire – _maybe_ vampire – who’d been abandoned for better paper or greener pastures.

_ Un_like Naruto, though, Lee had no trouble believing the murder in Gaara’s eyes.

“Who is Naruto to you?” Lee asked instead, folding his arms. “What do you want with him?”

“The same thing you do, I reckon,” said Gaara, mirroring the gesture. Lee would not be thrown off.

“And what do I want with him?”

“To save his life,” said Gaara, simply, “and to keep Sasuke Uchiha’s Slayer from striking again. After all . . ._someone’s_ got to do it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one goes out to my wife who i miss loads now that she moved to buttfuck nowhere . . . it does NOT go out to sasuke uchiha . . . he sold crack to minors


	3. Come as You Are

“Lee, I’m going to kill you.”

Tenten didn’t say it like a threat, but as a promise, and her dark eyes blazed as she bore down on him. Lee was struck, quite suddenly, that only his friend and fellow Slayer could have made a University of Konoha at Kurama _Bruins_ T-shirt and glittery legwarmers seem like combat fatigues, her takeaway cup from Starbucks as deadly as a dagger in her hands.

“Please don’t,” said Lee, at last.

Tenten didn’t look moved by his pleas. She slammed her pager down on the table so hard Lee watched his tea jump in his own mug, the saucer clattering against the tabletop. “Why did you tell those vamps we were on their side?” she demanded. “No,” she added, after a beat, “let me rephrase. Why the _hell_ did you tell them we were on their side?”

Lee could only shrug. “They think we’re vamps, too, Tenten. This might be our in with them!”

“Then they’re as _stupid _as you are,” admonished Neji, swirling in behind them. Though watery sunlight had finally broken through the cloud cover, he still wore a long black greatcoat, collar turned up like a vicar’s. Out of all of them, he was possibly the only one who looked even remotely vampiric: all silvery skin and glossy dark hair, thin lips stained Kool-Aid red (though this was, admittedly, quite literally due to his drinking the Kool-Aid). “Lee,” he sighed, sidling up next to Tenten in their booth seat, “you should at least have asked us before you decided to strike up an alliance with these guys.”

“I know.” Lee spread his hands. “It just . . . it happened so fast, you know?”

The coffeeshop was all but empty as Saturday dipped into twilight, low-watt institutional lighting made all the dimmer by pulsing neon signs of bars and fast food joints on the opposite side of the Main Street. When van Helsing’s lot had first organised the Slayers, nightfall might have belonged to the dead: the _“music of the night” _that had so moved Dracula and the Phantom had been operatic only in the pitch of disembodied screams. Now, the music was by Blur and Ace of Base, and the dead no longer held a monopoly on the moonlight – rather, it was by night that even small towns like Kurama came to life, and cliques and coteries of carefree teens seemed to doll themselves up only to toss themselves onto silver platters for their local vampires. For Lee, the prospect was terribly sad.

Sadder still, though, was the way the weight of Tenten’s disapproving glare and Neji’s stony frown seemed to drive his fatigue all the way to his core, ripping along fraying muscles like scissors through wrapping paper and crushing into the honeycomb cracks of his bones. Lee might have buried his head in his hands if he’d thought his arms up to the task. Instead, he rocked backward on his seat, and closed his eyes. The blurs behind his eyelids were of mottled greys and greens as the Uzushio reservation washed across his vision – and the shocks of red and blue that jumped out at him were more than just sunspots.

His heart had been in his throat, he recalled, when the vampire Gaara had offered him a cold hand to shake, and Lee had been convinced he would have heard his pulse hammering through his ribs – or at least felt his blood rushing under his skin. But Gaara had only declared himself _“Pleased to make your acquaintance” _and choked out a half-apology for _“getting off on the wrong foot” _when he’d realised Lee would not be leaving the cover of the grassy field. By that point, Lee supposed even vampirism paled to Southern etiquette, for Gaara had beckoned the other vampires – his fellow triplets, Lee had learned – over to meet Lee, and invited him to their rez-side hideout for sweet tea from a Wedgwood pot.

_ “It was like being stuck on the set of _Gone with the Wind_,”_ Lee had told Tenten, between the phone line’s crackles, coming to signal her indignant splutters. _“Southern pride and Southern prejudice.”_

_ “How’d you convince them you were a vampire?”_ Tenten had wanted to know, after a halfhearted snicker at the comment. _“Did you whip out a pair of shades and a giant hat when you left Naruto’s? It _was_ mildly sunny, after all.”_

Lee’s shrug had translated to his voice. _“I told them ‘Black didn’t crack.’ They were from rural Suna, Tenten, I doubt they’d have known otherwise.”_

Now, though, Lee’s knuckles were as white and bloodless as Gaara’s had been, and even without a lace fan or a velvet dress, Tenten had the female vampire’s, Temari’s, aloof judgment down to an art. Only Neji remained a staple of their own core group: even a vampire would never match the steel of Neji’s glare, his white eyes unwavering even as he took off his sunglasses.

“What exactly did you tell them, Lee?” he asked at last, and Lee felt his words stumble over his tongue as they rushed for the starting line.

“You’re not, ah, gonna yell at me some more?”

“I definitely will!” Tenten piped up, but Neji cut her off with a wave of his hand.

“We’re a team,” he said, flatly. “And that means that even if Lee’s the one who dug us this grave, we’re all lying in it.” He shrugged. “So what happened? How did you go from trying to kill each other to some weird hazing tea party?”

“I’m not convinced we ever left that first stage,” Lee was quick to assert. “But Gaara – that’s, uh, that’s the one I tried to stake – he said they’re new in town, and that they’re ‘_investigating_.’ They think Sasuke’s murder was the work of a Slayer.”

“It wasn’t.” Tenten’s eyebrows had nearly disappeared into her fringe, and it seemed to Lee they were trying to escape: trying to tumble off the soft curve of her forehead to find a stabler point of vantage – one less prone to creasing and wrinkles and stress-induced alopecia. “Duh.”

“_Duh_, duh,” grumbled Lee. It had stung to find out people could think so lowly of their noble cause – even if those people were the enemy they’d banded together to eradicate. “But I stuck pretty close to the truth: I told them the town’s been quiet on the vamp front for a while, now. I think we have them to thank for that,” he added, as an afterthought, “‘cause they made it seem like they had scared the real nasties off. They said they were sorry for ‘encroaching on our territory.’”

“Were they sorry enough to tell you how Gaara survived being staked?” asked Tenten. Lee shook his head.

“Other than their names, which we’d already sussed out, I didn’t find out much at all,” he relented. He tried for a shrug, but the muscles of his back were tense and tough as coiled steel; Lee felt a twinge of pain between his shoulderblades as he forced his posture into something more casual. Across the table, Neji remained ramrod-straight, and he spoke with the spit-polished accent of a newly titled lord as he rolled back into upbraid.

“No,” he agreed, slowly, “you rushed into uncharted territory to settle a personal vendetta. Isn’t that the case, Lee?”

“Come off it, Neji,” snapped Lee, voice hot. But hotter still were his cheeks, where twin patches of flame had risen under his skin, needling into the soft tissue and charring it into a stony, unmoving expression. The first time they’d read _Oedipus Rex_, when the three of them were in tenth grade together somewhere in Kiri (fateful, fateful Kiri), Lee had made no end of jokes about how Neji’s blindness let him see the truth so very well. Now, though, the days were few and far between where Lee could appreciate the scrutiny. Even as his fingers strayed to the waxed paper of a Splenda packet, Lee could feel the wormwood of that stake against his palms, and every shadow in the Starbucks seemed to be yet another black bloodstain – yet another wound on a vampire immune to stakes through the heart.

“We’ll work this out,” said Neji at last, pressing long fingers to his temples. “We always do.” He said it out of habit, and Lee could tell: his voice was more than tinged with annoyance, and his tread was heavy as he drudged out of the coffeeshop. All was silent for a long moment before Tenten slid from the booth as well, the vinyl of the seat _“sque-ea-eak_”ing against her thighs. Lee barely watched her go, and he stiffened when her voice rang out once more.

“Tell me this, Lee.” Tenten turned stiffly on her heel to meet his gaze, trailing her fingers against the plastic tabletop. They trembled, slightly, and Lee didn’t think it was because of her latte (he knew she ordered decaf). “Do you trust them?”

“No.” Lee was quick to answer, and the word felt like lava on his tongue, burning and heavy all at once. “Tenten,” he rushed to say, “they’re monsters. They’re . . . they probably offed Sasuke themselves, and they’re lying to cover it up.” He splayed his hands, hapless. “I don’t trust him.”

_ “Him.” _Only later would Lee feel the slip-up sour on his tongue. Now, Tenten only shrugged, and Lee watched her crumple the paper mug in her fist.

“And I don’t believe you,” she said, coolly. “But I’m tired. And we have patrol tonight.” She gave him one last pointed look. “Oh, and before you ask, _no_. Your new undead Scooby Gang is _not_ invited.”

Sunday morning brought the rain with it: icy water hurtling in sheets toward the ground, storm clouds black against a sky untouched by the dawn. Even Lee’s heaviest windbreaker – which was purple and orange, and whose zipper he’d clipped a glittery Hello Kitty keychain to – made a poor shield against the needling wind and the biting cold; he could almost feel the frost forming inside his lungs, and what little heat his heart had managed to pump through his system threatened to dissipate as soon as he stopped moving.

In that sense, he supposed he was lucky he’d been on the move since midnight. Tenten hadn’t been too thrilled when Lee had left her stranded by EoScene’s back door to chase after a bloody-necked drunk, stumbling down the alleyways, but she had been the one to admit the hunt waited for no one. It was from the drunkard’s advice, in the end, that Lee had picked up a trail moving east of town; by now, he’d walked halfway to the reservation limits, and it seemed to him the horizon had been washed away by the storm, the dark sky melting seamlessly into the rolling waves of grass.

Kurama was not so far north of Konoha’s Bay Area that it crossed over into the Pacific Northwest, which was perhaps why the plots of trees the locals called _“forests” _were sparse and airy, conifers far enough away from one another to sway in the fierce winds. Perhaps it was just because they were too big to do anything but. Northern Konoha was home to mountainous redwood pines, bare trunks stretching scores, even hundreds of metres into the sky, crowns so high up as to just be shadows over the gloaming. For Lee – who was tall only by a gymnast’s standards, at his proud five-five – standing in the shadows of the enormous trees and wading through grasses that came all the way up to his Hello Kitty-branded chest, it was hard not to feel small.

The feeling didn’t quite dislodge itself as he neared the cottage: rather, Lee felt as though it, too, was too small for its surroundings, some Sylvanian Families dollhouse discarded in the great outdoors.

_Make that_ Transylvanian _Families, _he thought, after a beat. In the warped glass of one of the cottage windows, Lee watched his reflection crack a smile at his own joke, all full lips and long lashes, and a thousand fine lines where the dust of the window melded with bruises long since faded into his skin.

The smile had begun to slip as quickly as it had arrived, but it wasn’t fully gone until a rumble of thunder sounded in the distance, pushing Lee’s posture and expression into something stiff and militant. He gave the door a good, solid knock (one he felt might be fitting for a good, solid Slayer), and rolled back on his heels to wait.

“Oh!”

In the dim silver light of the storm, Gaara’s pale face seemed all quick angles and delicate shadows, and Lee found the look of surprise he wore startlingly human. “Hi,” Lee managed at last, and forced his gaze from Gaara’s pale blue eyes to the way his canine teeth, long and sharp, jut ever so slightly over his lower lip when he spoke.

“Lee, was it? What are you . . . ah, what can I do you for?”Gaara’s smile wasn’t the predatory one Lee had come to expect from vampires: it was flimsy and too even, tearing neatly into his cheeks as he plastered the grin across his face. Lee matched it easily, and Gaara scrambled to press on: “Oh, where are my manners? Come in. You’ll catch your undeath of cold.”

_He makes jokes,_ thought Lee, biting back a grimace. _What’s next? Does he roll over and play fetch? _Already the decision to force himself into a collaboration with these strange vampires seemed like a deadly one; Lee had been all too quick to shove his foot in the door, and now, he got to yelp in pain as it closed on his toes (or, in this case, on the edges of his too-big galoshes).

“I won’t stay long,” Lee was quick to promise, but even as Gaara’s face settled back into a stony glare, he was bustling about the tiny kitchen to pull out a chair and pour up more sweet tea. “Temari! Kankuro!” he was calling. “The local’s here!”

The _“local?” _Lee supposed it was better than . . . _Actually, scratch that, nothing about this situation is good._

“Why?” The man Lee had correctly identified as Kankuro was the only one who truly seemed at home in his ten-gallon hat and dusty waistcoat: unlike the others, Lee could believe he hadn’t been exposed to the public since the eighteen hundreds. His dark blue eyes were set deep in his face, and his auburn hair was lank under the brim of the Stetson. Granted, Lee supposed – taking in the fresh scars tracing like so many ley lines across his flat features – there might have been a reason the man looked so very lifeless (beyond, well, his being dead).

“Hi,” said Lee, again. He lifted his hand in a halfhearted wave, and tried for one of Gai’s sunny smiles. “Your face is looking better.”

“No thanks to you,” said Kankuro. Lee twisted his tongue into his cheek. He’d wadded another flask of holy water down the hem of his jeans, and he wondered if the vamps could tell: if the burns on Kankuro’s face were stinging once more, and if he knew why.

“Don’t be pitching another one of your hissy fits, Kankuro. Not when we have company.”

Temari melted from the shadows with a subtle grace that Lee felt ill-suited to her attire: a walking gown in rich blue wool, and an enormous cameo brooch glittering at her (fang-scarred) throat. When Gaara had introduced the three of them as triplets, Lee had supposed, at first, that he could see it; though Temari’s curls were more strawberry blonde and Kankuro’s the victim of too much conditioner, they were all vaguely red-haired and coldly blue-eyed, and of course, they were all aggressively Sunan in a way that made Lee’s hair stand on end. But while both Gaara and Kankuro seemed sunken into clothes they hadn’t changed since the Civil War, Temari was as coy and collected as a Southern belle ought to be. Lee might have thought her the siblings’ leader if he hadn’t seen it: a shallow burn along her collarbone, where he’d tried to stake her two nights ago, too. The blow should have killed her, but Lee could see that somehow, for some reason, she wasn’t _as_ immune to the stake as her brother had been.

“Thanks, uh, ma’am.” Lee considered tipping his beanie to her, and decided against it.

“Don’t mention it.” Temari rested her hands on the dining table, and Lee noticed she wore white kid gloves buttoned at the wrist, their soft fabric gleaming in the dim light of the cottage’s bare bulbs. “But what brings you here, sir?” Lee felt his lips part as he began to answer, but Temari cut him off with a withering glare. “And more importantly, how’d you find our house?”

Lee’s nose wrinkled with his tight smile. “A tracker never reveals his secrets,” he boasted. In truth, he’d spent last night’s whole patrol with his Walkman tuned into the local police radio station, and he’d listened intently for any mentions of squatters, jaywalkers, or general ne’er-do-wells beyond the town’s eastern borders, where that drunk had indicated his attacker had flitted off. He’d visited seven other abandoned buildings before he’d chanced upon the secluded fieldside cottage.

“ . . . you oughta,” came Temari’s haughty voice, needling through his reverie, but it was to Gaara Lee’s attention fell. He’d pressed his lips into a thin line, and the pale blue of his eyes came as a stark contrast to the violet half-moon shadows stretching beneath them. Curled up in that old wooden chair, he struck an odd balance between his brother’s sullen quiet and his sister’s prickly confidence, and while Lee knew his glazed calm hid a monster’s unbridled hatred (and massive feeding fangs) Gaara seemed only vaguely bored as Temari droned on. When he did cut her off, he did so only with a wave of his hand.

“What’s in the bag, Lee?”

Lee had half-forgotten about the backpack, but his cheeks burned as he edged it from his shoulders – and watched how the raindrops rolling from the Arc’teryx-brand polyester had formed a tiny puddle beneath his seat. “Well, that’s why I’m here,” began Lee. “I was talking with my associates—”

“Your ‘associates?’” Gaara blinked slowly, and Lee thinned his lips, fumbling for the words.

“My, ah, _littermates_. My coven. My fellow literal and pop-cultural Deadheads.” Lee knew his smile was crooked: his left eye was twitching, slightly, and the muscles of his cheeks had turned the grimace into some twisted tug-of-war as he tried to keep the expression intact. “The Hyugas,” he heard himself say, at last. “That’s our, er, clan.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Neji was so dedicated to his Watcher duties he worked through near every Shabbat, and he hadn’t hesitated to turn down his cousin’s invitation fly first class back home to the East Coast for next week’s Passover, opting instead to stalk the undead. That same cousin, Hinata, had knitted Lee and Tenten dreidel-emblazoned sweaters every Hanukkah for the past four years. The six-pointed stars they both wore were supposedly anathema to vampires, as all religious symbols were – and besides, blood wasn’t Kosher. But Lee smiled through the lie, and when he spoke once more, his voice was flat again.

“Anyway,” he went on, “if we’re all going to be working together on this investigation, you lot have _got _to get with the times.” He unzipped the bag, and began pulling out fistfuls of fabric: flannels, ripped jeans, and the odd Pearl Jam T-shirt. “The twenty-first century’s less than ten years away. We figured we might as well drag you into the twentieth.”

“How . . . considerate.” Gaara’s lip curled over his fangs as he sneered, drawing a slinky black dress from the bag. Lee was grateful that nobody would see him flush. The dress had been Tenten’s, and she’d explicitly ordered Lee to wad it up and give it to Temari, announcing the _“poor witch”_ (well, she hadn’t quite said _“witch”_) deserved to look a little less _“repressed.”_ Lee was quite sure it had nothing to do with the fact that Neji had once admonished the dress’ glow-in-the-dark beading as _“kinda tacky.”_

“Well, that’s quite all.” Lee scrambled to his feet, wadding the backpack into his fists as he moved. He didn’t want to stay any longer than he had to – not now that he’d done his job. Neji had retreated once more into the safety and fluorescence of their local Burger King as Lee and Tenten went on patrol, stitching tiny carbon microphones into all their last-season clothes. Even if they never saw the (figurative) light of day again, trading the depths of Lee’s and Neji’s shared closet to the vampires’ probably-equally-dusty armoire, Lee knew the plan was a solid one. He may never have convinced Tenten and Neji to trust these vampires – indeed, he didn’t exactly trust them himself – but Lee was confident they’d know their true role in the investigation of Sasuke’s (un)fortunate demise soon enough.

After all, they didn’t have MTV. There was little for them to do, other than scheme.

Now, though, Gaara’s pale hand shot out like a viper, and his fingers were cold when he closed them around Lee’s wrist. “Aren’t you off like a scalded haint?” he wanted to know, and Lee could only balk.

“I have no idea what that means,” he said, quite honestly. By contrast, Gaara’s smile was even faker now than it had been before.

“That storm won’t be letting up anytime soon,” he said, tightly. “Why don’t you stay for tea?”

Lee’s tongue felt like cotton, and it snagged on the sandpaper surface of the roof of his mouth as he swallowed. _Because I don’t want to, _he thought, but he got the feeling Gaara wasn’t asking.

Tea was once again served in immaculate china, but Lee’s stomach churned as he saw that this time, the liquid to jump in his cup as Temari bumped against the table was a deep, opaque red. He’d had yak’s blood, once, when Tenten had taken to her people’s traditional cooking – but this was a far cry from rice and _gyurma_, which could be drowned in hot sauce. No, this was a test, and Lee had never been so sure he was going to fail. His fingers trembled as he reached for the sugar bowl, swirling so much into the blood tea (blood tea!) it began to lighten.

“It’s goose.”

“Hm?”

Lee forced a smile as he turned on Kankuro, whose voice was as gritty as Lee’s tea promised to be – if far less saturated by any kind of sugar. “We don’t hunt often,” he managed, half-apologetically. “So we bought goose blood from a butcher down in Kurama.”

Lee couldn’t be sure if that made it better or worse. Instead, he tried for another smile, mind reeling – stumbling over blurry snapshots of grassy fields and grey skies to the image of that drunk he’d apprehended, who was staggering from more than just absinthe, thick fingers twitching against gashes gouged into his neck. He was struck, then, by how pale and drawn Gaara and Kankuro seemed, even for vampires – and how elegant Temari seemed, lounging on that rickety wooden chair like it was a throne. Her lips were redder than any vampire’s had any right to be, and Lee knew, from that new _Sense and Sensibility_ movie that Neji had dragged him to see, that only prostitutes had worn lipstick back in their day.

Pressing his napkin to his nose and squeezing his eyes shut made the blood slightly easier to drink, and none of the vampires seemed particularly offended when Lee loudly announced he hated geese. Gaara’s pale eyes were unreadable when he moved to offer Lee his arm (_What a gentleman, _thought Lee, trying to ignore the blood staining the corners of Gaara’s mouth), and he shepherded him with preternatural grace toward the door.

“Walk with me,” he said. Once more, it wasn’t exactly an offer.

The rain had stopped at some point during teatime, but the fog had settled so low over those high grasses that Lee felt he was simply pushing through the clouds, rather than finding some dry solace beneath them. Gaara himself might have been a particularly insistent wisp of mist; Lee’s only real inklings of where he was came as his cold hands clamped around his elbow, and as the dull red glow of his hair, bobbing through the mist like a will-o’-the-wisp. A _“feu follet,”_ as they were called in the deep South – if not in Suna. That part of the country was a toss-up between sand and swamp, but Shukaku, the rural Sunan town where Gaara had explained he and his siblings were from, was all dude ranches and conservatism.

“Do you have any siblings, Lee?”

Gaara’s voice was even raspier than Lee had grown accustomed too, and his own sounded high and childish in comparison. “Not that I know of,” he tried to joke. “I was an orphan.” When Gaara lapsed into silence once more, Lee rushed to elaborate. “But Ten— well, one of the girls in our _coven_, she and I grew up together. She’s basically my sister.”

“How far would you go to protect her?” Gaara wanted to know. Suddenly, Lee was glad his anchor to Gaara was on his left: otherwise, he would surely have heard Lee’s Hello Kitty heart hammering away at the wrong side of his ribs. “Would you die for her?”

“Die again, you mean?”

“I said what I said.” Gaara was only an inch or so taller than Lee was, but his presence filled the field, wrestling against the crackling ozone in the sky for control of the air as well. For the first time, his waistcoat and silk pants didn’t seem like silly Halloween getup: Lee knew Gaara represented something much older and darker than he ever would, and not only by virtue of his vampirism. “I want to know,” he stated, flatly, “if it’s for her sake, her and your other loved ones, that you’re poking your nose into Sasuke Uchiha’s mess.”

“Can’t I be concerned about someone messing with my town?” demanded Lee. Gaara’s lips twitched – but not in a smile. Quick as a whip, his grasp turned iron on Lee’s arm, and he struck: wedging his knee to Lee’s core, and forcing him to his knees.

“I don’t reckon so, _Slayer_,” he spat. “Gods almighty. My siblings may be as thoughtless as they are bloodless, but did you really think your stunting would convince me for long?”

Lee hadn’t thought much of anything about Gaara, but he didn’t have the chance to say so before his words were snatched from his throat. Gaara had slid a delicate silver knife from his sleeve, but Lee was faster – and instinct was faster still. He rolled to the side, disappearing into the grass just long enough to whip the flask of holy water from his belt. He saw a flash of fear flicker across Gaara’s features, his pale eyes going wide, before they narrowed once more.

“Is that how you want to play this?”

“I _am_ itching for a rematch,” said Lee. It was all he could think to say: after all, there was little point in demanding how he’d been found out; it was a miracle the other two vampires had actually bought it as he lied through his (definitely not-fanged) teeth. “Come on,” he goaded Gaara, “let’s see how you fare against—”

In the end, all Gaara would be tested against was the blare of sirens. _“Wee-ooh! Wee-ooh!” _they screeched, flashing lights only just bright enough to cut through the fog (Lee knew the lightning never would). “The feds!”cried Lee, and forgetting, for a moment, why they were out in that field in the first place, he grabbed Gaara by the wrist, tugging him along. “That’s the reservation road,” he managed, weaving around bushes and grass.

“Uzumaki!” gasped Gaara, and Lee didn’t know if he was too Southern or not Southern enough for the expletives to follow. “We’ll settle this later,” he told Lee. But as the two of them bounded for the dirt road, racing after the police car, Lee found he doubted they’d have the time.

“Did I or did I not tell you I was going to _kill you_?”

Lee had never feared for his life quite in the way he did now, Tenten’s fists digging deep into his back as she folded him into a hug, lifting him easily off the muddy ground. “Tenten,” he hissed, “put me down—”

But she lifted him higher still, and when she did set him down on the ground, Lee squeezed his eyes shut in preparation for the fist she brought down on his arm. “You idiot! You total, complete idiot!” she berated him, gripping him by the shoulders. “Marching all by yourself into the lions’ den and then getting us outed . . . oh, I thought you were going to _die_!”  
“Me too, Tenten,” he whispered, laying his head on her shoulder. “Me too.”

She and Neji had made it to the reservation around the same time Lee (and Gaara) had, and the two of them leaned now against the hood of their sad old Jeep, casting furtive glances every so often toward the armada of police cars from under Tenten’s enormous yellow anorak. It was easily big enough to dwarf them both, but Lee found himself grateful for the security blanket, and the way it tinged the bleak visage of the reservation with something almost like sunshine (or at least dye number twelve). If nothing else, it let him hide. Lee – a wiry Black boy who spent most of his nights hanging around cemeteries – was wary enough around local cops, but the Kurama constabulary was on defence, now, as they pulled up to the reservation. They’d agreed to let Neji handle talking to them – Neji and Sakura, that was, who was hanging from his arm, her green eyes rimmed with red.

“Monsters.”

“Hm?”

“You heard me,” said Tenten, softly. “They’re monsters, Lee, and don’t you forget that. They . . . ” She shifted against him, slightly, to look out over the grounds, and the gooseflesh rising on her arms felt as cold and hard as gravel. “I’m happy we aren’t going to try working with them,” she said, at last.

Lee said nothing at all.

He hadn’t seen where Gaara had disappeared to, once they’d crossed the reservation borders, but he could guess. Naruto’s single-storey house was wrapped tighter than a mummy with police tape, and darting shadows turned the whitewashed siding into a sprawling chessboard, beat cops swarming around it like so many pawns. Lee wondered how many of them knew what was really going on. He wondered if he ever would.

The answer to his first question came quickly enough, as Neji began winding back toward the Jeep. Sakura was dragging her feet behind him, and Lee rushed wordlessly forward to take her other arm, holding her steady until she was ready to collapse into the shotgun seat. “How is she—” he began to ask, but as a great, shuddering sob sounded from the driver’s side door, Lee figured there was little point in asking.

“Cops are ruling it a suicide,” said Neji, arching his eyebrows. The contempt to his voice was ill-disguised. “Naruto Uzumaki apparently cut his own gods-damned head off.”

“Gods almighty,” whispered Lee. It was what he’d heard Gaara say, earlier, and it sounded good.

But if the flicker of annoyance to rise in his chest at the thought of Gaara was a candle’s flame, rage crashed over it like a tidal wave (or at the very least, an industrial-sized fire extinguisher); his meagre breakfast had already rocked precariously on the sea of his stomach, and it was hurtling up his throat, now, like his gut was the whirlpool Charybdis itself. _“A suicide.”_ How would that even have been possible? And beyond that, how could anyone, cop or no, justify stamping that across the police report?

It wasn’t until Tenten’s hand closed around his Lee realised he was shaking. He’d known well enough to fear the quiet to settle over Kurama, but he hadn’t expected that a string of silenced voices – of _murders_ – would have driven that hush in deeper still.

“‘Murder,’” said Lee, under his breath. “What an ugly word.”

If Tenten heard him, she said nothing, and Lee couldn’t help but feel that was worse. Their intertwined hands were stained with more blood than he could think to quantify, the ash of so many dead vampires caking their skin. It was hardly the first time he’d thought of such things – indeed, there was a reason their apartment’s bathroom was cluttered with magazine cutouts and inspirational quotes, and why Lee made a point of singing the most inane pop songs he could think of in the shower – but now was the first time he had faces and voices to pin to all those nights of Slaying, the first time it was a _human_ head they’d be mulling over, the—

“_Lee_!”

Neji might not have had Tenten’s strength, but Lee still buckled over the hood of the car as Neji swatted him across the arm, and he could almost hear those leaden thoughts rattling around in his skull, like ball bearings at the bottom of a spray can. His arms had wound up locked tight around his ribs, and Lee wasted little time in stretching them high over his head, forcing his knuckles to snap-crackle-pop under the heavy, humid air.

“Sorry! Got caught up in it all,” he said quickly, bouncing back on his heels. “What, uh, what was my job?”

“_Nothing_,” snapped Tenten, but Neji turned toward her voice with an icy glare.

“We need their resources—”

“Oh, the ones they used to get Naruto?”

“They were with Lee all day! They have alibis!”

“More like ali-_lies_!”

“_Shut up_!”

Sakura’s cry was watery beyond even her tears: Lee thought she sounded like she was drowning. “All of you, _shut up_,” she snapped again. “My friend is dead, and the three of you are just arguing like . . . like somehow, he isn’t! Like you can _do_ anything! Like you plan to bring him _back_!”

“Sakura . . . ” Lee began, but he pressed his lips shut, and watched as Sakura staggered from the Jeep, swiping at her eyes.

“I’ll tell you all what you’re going to _fucking_ do,” she snarled. “You’re gonna tell me what the _fuck_ is going on. And then . . . and then . . . ”

Before long, she’d dissolved into sobs again, and Lee fixed Tenten and Neji with a despairing look. _“Do something,”_ it said, and if that wasn’t enough, he said it aloud, too:  
“For the love of the gods, do something!”

Tenten was stiff as a board even as her friend crumpled against the car door, and it was Neji, in the end, who took her by the arm, sitting her down to talk. Tenten’s only response was to drive a kick into their front tyre, so hard she dented the hubcap.

Lee’s kick cracked it.

“I hate this,” she professed, as the two of them began stalking toward the crowd of police. “I know, I know, ‘hate is a strong word—’”

“And it’s fitting,” said Lee, voice hoarse. “I hate this, too. I hate feeling powerless. And I hate that . . . well . . . ”

_ I hate that bad things happen to people, _he’d wanted to say, but Lee – clutching his Hello Kitty keychain – had never felt so childish. So shallow. The Uzushio reservation stretched out for leagues into the fog, but the ground was lost before that, to litter and crushed beer cans; ramshackle houses bowed under the ozone, and their walls strained where so many faces had pressed against screen doors and warped windows. Lee had holy water at his waist and a stake shoved into his pocket, but what good would they do?

He closed his fingers around the stake all the same as they edged toward the unkempt grass of the fields all the same, watching his knuckles whiten around greying wood as the landscape came to life with a rare blotch of colour: a scrap of red floating through the haze. Gaara didn’t quite _weave_ through the scrub: he seemed to glide through it, edging forward like he was being pulled along by some cosmic sewing needle. It was effortless and impassive, and Lee’s cheeks, already warm, stung as his face warped into a now-familiar frown.

“What did you find?” he demanded, wasting little time on formalities. Gaara seemed to take it as an invitation, turning past Tenten to look Lee in the eye.

“Jack all,” he snapped. “So, you know. We have our work cut out for us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i dont get no sleep cuz of <s>y'all</s> LOVING ROCK LEE, <s>y'all</s> LOVING ROCK LEE not gon get no sleep cuz of me
> 
> in all seriousness im happy this chapter is over cuz the last three chapters were supposed to just be one chapter, until i decided that i wanted this fic to be 13 chapters long for the 𝖆𝖊𝖘𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖙𝖎𝖈
> 
> so you know . . . sláinte . . .


	4. Push It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this one goes out to [@a_gay_poster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster) . . . boo you're an angel and i hope you know how much i appreciate your support! i also hope you have a birthday coming up so it isn't weird if i dedicate my next gaalee work to you

The moonlight was about as bright as charcoal, behind the cover of the clouds, and the sky reminded Lee of crushed velvet, all mottled greys against the rich purple twilight. The beginning of spring had always felt awkwardly soft, to him: the plants weren’t quite budding and baby birds didn’t really have down, but the outside world was at least trying to accommodate the survivors of yet another winter.

In contrast, though, the hard shadows falling across their living room were great blocks of anthracite, and even the plushest of blankets and throw pillows seemed cut at pin corners, every right angle a threat. Lee struggled to feel the zipper of the couch cushion digging into his back as anything but the blade of a dagger – or the tip of the stake. When he felt the breeze shift ever so slightly, his skin tightened beneath it, though the anticipation meant nothing: he still stiffened when the sofa sank under Neji’s weight, as though it were the very earth beneath him that was shifting.

“You alright there, son?” asked Gai. If Lee hadn’t already been perched at the edge of the sofa, he might have started, forward, at his voice – but he didn’t. Gai’s tone wasn’t quite soft to him, then. Rather, his low voice reminded Lee of crunching gravel: something that only lost its hard edges in comparison to the granite it was sourced from. Lee let himself slump back against the sofa cushions, patting Gai’s hand where it lay limp on the armrest of his wheelchair.

“Just tired.” It wasn’t a lie. “And I’ve gotta admit that I’m _not_ loving this movie.”

“Shut it!” hissed Tenten. From his vantage on the corner of the sofa, Lee could scarcely see her: she’d leaned all the way back into the far corner to let Neji rest his head on her chest as he dozed. From the sound of it, she spoke now around a mouthful of either pillow or Neji’s hair (and Lee wasn’t sure which he hoped to be the answer). “We’re _bonding_,” she insisted, hotly. “So shut up and watch the sexism with the rest of us.”

It was certainly one way to put it, and Lee frankly thought Tenten was being generous. The Friday night feature was a rerun of that old _Jiraiya Bond _flick: _You Only Live Twice_. They’d tuned in just in time to watch Agent Jiraiya, fair hair dyed shoe-polish black and face caked with sallow concealer, sink into a hot spring surrounded by _geisha_, boasting, after being told his chest hair gave his whiteness away, that_ “Birds don’t make nest in an empty tree.”_

Tenten had been wearing two pencils wound into her hair when she’d first sat down with homework she didn’t intend to do. Ten minutes into the movie, she had snapped both of them, and hurled the shards like throwing knives into the far wall; they were down to one ice cream spoon now that Lee had managed to twist one until it broke. Though Gai was confined to his chair (and, Lee noticed, sneaking a glance at his father’s limp arms, though he was weaker tonight than he had been in weeks) even he had managed some dignified rage, rocking back and forth: the tyre treads were just visible against the floor when the TV set flickered. Only Neji hadn’t spoken up, being sound—

“Someone’s here.”

_ —Asleep._

The only light in the room came from the TV – the Shabbat candles were flickery at best in the chilly air – but it was bright enough to shine off Neji’s white eyes; they bounced the glow back like a cats’. Still, there was nothing catlike about the way he pried shakily himself from Tenten’s stiffening frame, shoulders rolling forward and jaw set. Stress tumbled off him in sloughs – too palpable, too solid for waves – and though Lee longed to comfort his friend, his heart was in his throat, too. So instead, he stood, ever so slowly. Sure enough, as soon as Neji had said it, they watched the door jump in its hinges: once, twice, three times. The knocking echoed dully against the old wood, creeping through the room with the hesitance of far-off thunder.

Tenten signalled to Lee silently, and he didn’t have to look back to know her plan. Inching forward, and rocking back on his heels so his footsteps wouldn’t creak against the floorboards, Lee crept to the altar – where a great wooden cross, the symbol of the gods’ divine tree, hung sharpened into a stake. Tenten hugged the walls as she moved into the kitchen, edging the fridge open for a fresh bottle of holy water. _“On three,”_ said her gaze, and she flashed her fingers to confirm Lee had understood. Then she closed her fist. _“Three!”_

Tenten shoved the door open, and Lee lunged – but his stake passed only through air, and the force of his strike sent him tumbling forward. _“Pop!”_ There went his ankle, rolling in its socket, and Lee could feel the cold tile of the landing before his knees slammed into it.

_Wait._

It wasn’t that his legs, specifically, were cold: the air in front of him seemed degrees cooler than the rest of the building. Slowly, Lee shook the wind and the stars from his eyes, and the blur of shadow in front of him took on a cool tinge of red, the apartment’s dim lights catching on two pale blue pinpricks.

Gaara.

“Gods almighty!”

Gaara’s hand had been hovering over Lee’s shoulder, but Tenten had no such reservations. She wrenched Lee to his feet, so hard the hallway light flickered to light, motion sensors startled into action. “What the hell?” she demanded, of no one in particular. When no answer came, she tried again: “What the _hell_?”

“Gaara.” It seemed as good a place to start as any, and Lee fumbled to slip the stake into the hem of his gym shorts, spreading empty hands. “How did you find us?”

Gaara was silent, for a moment, and when he did smile it looked more like a postmortem spasm. “A tracker never reveals his secrets,” he said, at last. Lee didn’t know whether to laugh or scoff (and doing both made him sound a bit like a horse with laryngitis). For a moment, Gaara’s lips parted with something almost like hope – something almost human – but he fell under a palatial calm once more as Tenten shoved Lee aside.

“This is no time for jokes, Marilyn Manson,” she snapped. Gaara frowned.

“That’s not my name.”

_ Perhaps not, _thought Lee, but he couldn’t deny it was a fitting epithet. The starched collar of Gaara’s shirt, turned up high enough to brush the quick lines of his jaw, was inky-black even under the fluorescents, and he wore a boxy oilskin over his shoulders like a cape. The effect was more than a little _“Lestat de Lioncourt,”_ and had he not carved a secret stake compartment in his copy of _Interview with the Vampire_, the thought might have brought a smile to his face. As it was, though, the best Lee could manage was blank and unmoving; his reflection in Gaara’s unreadable eyes seemed like it was a construction paper collage.

“Do you, uh, want to come in? Gaara?”

Gaara’s eyes went wide, and under the hallway’s cold light, their icy blue seemed washed out, somehow: only still glacial in the sense they reminded Lee of the melting ice caps he saw on the news. He’d been struck, last week, when he’d visited their cottage, about how different he looked when he was in shock. The effect was just as jarring now as it had been then. Gaara’s normal, non-vamp features were vaguely elfin – all quick angles and high cheekbones – and when his jaw went slack and his eyes went blank, Lee could almost imagine what he was sure were centuries being shaved off his tense frame. If he’d had any other kind of immortal hovering on his doorstep – a demigod, maybe, some creature of myth – Lee might have felt vindicated, then, and more than a little honoured: in six short words (and one _“uh”_) he’d somehow gotten his stranger to be young and vulnerable and _human_ again, if only for the moment.

But as it was, Gaara had apparently been sucking blood for long enough for even his _“human teeth”_ to grow into fangs (making his slight overbite seem far more apparent than Lee could see it really was) and Lee was holding an enormous rowan crucifix. So he stood silently to the side, and took Tenten’s hand, hoping she wouldn’t put up too much of a fight.

She didn’t speak at all for almost a minute – it had fallen to Lee to explain theirs was a shoes-off house – and when she did raise her voice, her tone was dry. “You caught us in the middle of movie night,” she said offhandedly. “Do you know what movies are, Miss Teen Xymox?”

Lee saw Gaara’s lips thin. “I do, in fact, _ma’am_. My siblings and I watched _Arrival of a Train at the Station_ when the original Lumière cinematographs first came to Suna salons, back in the nineties.”

“We’re _in_ the nineties,” said Lee. Gaara tried once more for a smile, and Lee decided he’d grin back.

“The eighteen-nineties.”

“Well, son, you don’t look a _day_ over a hundred.”

They hadn’t closed the door behind them, and the stairwell’s light streamed valiantly in against the dam of movie night mood-lighting. Gai pushed into its glow like it was his own personal spotlight. Even with a heavy quilt wadded around his hips, to hide what wasn’t left of his legs, he still seemed every bit the Olympic athlete, and Lee was quick to flit to his side, eager to mimic some of that easy confidence. With Gai all smiles and Neji and Tenten a symphony of snarls in the darkness, Lee felt they might have been some Renaissance painting, as they stared Gaara down: Gai was their Kelloggs-branded Messiah, and his apostles, disarmingly diverse, were as attractive a backdrop as a United Colours of Benetton ad.

But paintings were famously static, and Gai was anything but. He beamed as he offered a trembling hand for Gaara to shake, edging his wheelchair back and forth restlessly. “Gaara, was it? I’ve heard . . . well, I haven’t heard very much about you at all, actually. The kids don’t talk vampires with me that often anymore.”

Gaara blinked, and Lee watched him shift, ever so slightly, on the balls of his feet as his gaze fell to Gai’s lap. The whole _“double amputee”_ thing drew enough attention with the normal populace, and Lee’s stomach churned as he felt Gaara’s thoughts begin to race. “Blood poisoning?” he asked, at last. “When were you bitten?”

“Right after the eighty-four ‘Games,” said Gai, and he puffed out his chest as though he were talking about his all-around gold medal, and not about what was to follow. “These two—” he gestured to Lee and Tenten “—weren’t old enough to be proper Slayers yet, so I had to take on a solo job. Vamp got me in the femoral.”

Lee shuddered at the memory. He and Tenten had been so little – fresh out of the third or fourth grade – and he’d never felt such horror as he had seeing Gai clutching at his bleeding leg as he stumbled into their Ishigakure hotel room, vampiric ash a thick grey paste over his person where it had mixed with venom and blood. He’d guided them through an emergency surgery, Lee making a tourniquet out of his favourite childhood _“blankie”_ and Tenten washing the wound out with everything in the suite minifridge – but they’d been too late. Enough venom had reached Gai’s heart to begin pumping through his bloodstream proper – to begin Turning him, ever so slowly, into a vampire. Ten-odd years later, the best the Watcher’s council had managed for one of their most esteemed Slayers was the odd amputation and birthday cards.

“ . . . where we met Neji over there,” Gai was going on, animatedly. Neji stiffened at the sound of his name. “Hadn’t even started middle school and he’d already begun medical research on a cure for the Revenant Infectious Pathogen. Why don’t you tell our guest about that, Neji?”

“Sorry,” said Neji, right on cue, “I can’t. Rabbi Hiashi says it’s against _Halacha _to talk to vampires.”

Hiashi _was_ certainly a rabbi, but he was also Neji’s very richest uncle, which was why Lee knew he’d certainly never said anything of the sort. Still, Neji’s eyes were wide and earnest, and Tenten’s lips were twitching in silent laughter as she settled back in at his side. Though Lee might usually have been laughing along with them, he could only feel uncomfortable, now, the ghosts of unsaid jokes souring on his tongue. They knew now that Gaara and his siblings were the root of Kurama’s vampiric dry spell, and trusting that they (mostly) didn’t hunt humans, Lee and the others had enjoyed more calm in the week since they’d allied with the Sunans than they had in years. It just didn’t feel quite right to force him out – even if he was, technically, still the enemy.

Besides, Tenten and Neji were so easy together: no matter how Tenten bristled whenever he brought it up, Lee would have had to have been blinder than Neji had ever been not to see the tender gazes she gave him or the way they always folded into each other. He knew well enough how an outsider might have felt, especially one who they’d tried to kill a week and a half ago.

Lee swallowed his unease forcibly, and when he tried for a smile it was Vaseline-smooth. “Can we get you anything, Gaara?” he chirped, and though Gaara and Tenten insisted _“No!”_ at the same time, Lee was more persistent still. “We’ve got tons of ice cream.” They had tons of _melted _ice cream, and Neji had folded the soggy remains of the _Ben & Jerry’s _cartons they’d worked through thus far into an army of cootie-catchers and paper cranes. But Lee offered Gaara a spoon and a megawatt grin all the same.

“I’m only here to pass on some news,” said Gaara at last. “Temari was feeling a bit under the weather, so we came to the topic of cocaine—”

“_How_?” demanded Lee. Gaara didn’t seem to hear him, pressing on with a careful frown.

“We’d known Sasuke Uchiha had been one of the most prominent distributors in the town, and we reckoned that in his, ah, absence, there’d be a power vacuum of sorts: dealers scrambling over one another to fill his shoes, take his clients. But that wasn’t the case, not at all. He’s apparently handed everything over to an associate – a human boy with bite scars on both sides of his neck. His name was Sai,” he scrambled to add, and flashing an uneasy smile once more, he rushed to joke: “Terrible customer service.”

“Drugs are for mugs,” mumbled Lee, “that’s why it rhymes.” But it was Tenten’s turn to brighten, popping to her feet and scrambling for her bookbag.

“‘Sai?’” she echoed. “Twink City with _Basketball Diaries _hair and an utterly inexcusable nose piercing?”

“‘Nose piercing,’” Gaara confirmed, after a beat. His eyes were wide once more, and Lee felt himself thin his lips, trying not to laugh at his all-too-evident confusion. He seemed all the more caught off guard when Tenten had the gall to smile, a flyer in her clenched fist as she turned toward the room once more.

“Ino snuck off with some guy named Sai at the baseball game on Wednesday night,” she explained, eyes blazing. “He stopped us before we went home to give us these. I think he was scared Ino would forget him otherwise.” She paused, as though to indicate that wasn’t unlikely, before schooling her features once again. She unfolded the flyer to flash her audience an advert for the local university’s _vernissage_ – where Sai’s name was bolded over an inkblot motif. “We have a new lead, everyone.”

“We sure do.” Lee was quick to speak, even if he didn’t really know why. “Thank you, Gaara.”

Tenten’s words had peppered the room like machine-gun fire, and Gaara had been quick to take cover in the shadows of the kitchen – but even from his vantage point by the shoe rack, Lee could see that Gaara’s pale eyes were shining. If he’d had enough blood, he might have blushed. Instead, though, he spoke in a voice too high and clear to sound genuine. “I’d best be going,” he announced, as though it were a statement of some defiance. Lee cut his eye over to him, watching him fold his pale hands at his waist.

“You don’t have to,” he hazarded. “You could stay and . . . well, the movie’s over, but I think we have _The Young and the Restless _on tape.”

Gaara didn’t speak until he’d made it into the front hall, the stairwell’s light catching on the planes of his face and deepening the shadows: he seemed an X-ray of a boy (if not so boyish, centuries settling like dust on his bloodless skin). “Are you sure?” he asked at last. Lee shrugged.

“No,” he answered, quite honestly. “But you might as well.”

Saturday morning was announced by a herald of screeching crows and jays, and the creaking of Lee’s tired bones as he peeled himself from the fold-out bed were an awkward harmony to their cries. He’d slept well, all things considered – or, at least, no more fitfully than usual; his head barely ached as he tried to recall his dream. It had been an odd one: he’d been in the living room, though the windows had been replaced by an enormous pair of unblinking blue eyes, their gaze equally cagey and benign as he struggled to solve a Rubik’s cube. Lee figured he’d have to ask Tenten what it meant. She was good at those sorts of things.

“Mornin’.”

“Oh!”

Lee tried to school his features as he whirled around, but it was too early in the day for his motions to be in time with his thoughts: his eyes were so wide he felt the cool air sting at their surfaces, and he was afraid his awe was still all too visible. “Gaara,” he began, “you . . . you’re still here.”

Gaara had perched himself precariously on the windowsill, knees hugged close to his chest. His eyes, already sharp, were made all the more narrowed by the bruiselike shadows beneath them – but his expression softened into something that might have been polite as he pressed his back to the window. “Figured it’d be rude to leave in the middle of the night,” he said, at last. Lee felt his eyebrows knit.

“Didn’t you get any sleep?” He’d curled up in the corner of the fold-out bed with the intent of giving Gaara room, and it stung, slightly, to think the gesture went unnoticed.

Gaara pursed his lips, and at first, his frown seemed a warning; for half a second, maybe less, Lee was struck by the memory of Gaara’s wicked fangs and his measured retorts, his delicate features impish and cruel in the back-alley light behind EoScene. But the expression was gone as quickly as it had come, and Gaara’s shoulders rose and fell in what Lee thought might have been a shrug. “No,” he decided, at last, his drawl stretching it across too many syllables. “No, I don’t sleep much.”

Lee hoped his frown didn’t cut too deeply, and decided, at last, to hide it behind a yawn. “Can I get you something for breakfast?”

“Do you have any goose blood?”

Lee wasn’t quite sure if Gaara was joking, and he could only fold his arms across his chest, padding uneasily to the kitchen. “We’ve got Pop-Tarts.”

Gaara settled for the brown sugar cinnamon flavour, and he managed a smile and a _“thank you kindly”_ when Lee poured him some whey protein (undead or no, Gaara was nearly as thin as Neji was: he looked like he needed it). Breakfast was blessedly calm. Gaara was dutifully quiet as Lee went to wake first Gai, and then Tenten, their chatter about the morning damp and the movie night before piercing the heady air like a stick-and-poke needle. Every once in a while, Lee would try to throw Gaara a bone, looking up from beneath long lashes as he rolled out a string of _“What do you think of that?”_s, endlessly sunny.

Perhaps that sunshine was why Gaara never answered.

Neji was the last to wake, as usual, but this morning might have been the first in his life he was greeted by such a chorus of catcalls – or at least the first time he’d garnered them fully clothed. His cheeks went nearly as scarlet as his borrowed flannel, and his dark features and pale, pale eyes seemed all the more monochrome against the cheery tie-dye of his Grateful Dead shirt. “Don’t,” he warned them all, as he moved for the cranky old coffee machine. “I mean it, Tenten!”

“Father Time meets Acid Fest,” she simpered, flashing dimples. “I’ve waited so long for this day.”

Gai’s grin was stained red by his own Pop Tart (classic strawberry), but it was brilliant all the same. “You’re finally looking your youth, son,” he told Neji, whose scowl looked deadlier than the three Slayers and the vampire in the kitchen combined.

It was that vampire who finally broke the spell, frowning across the cluttered table. “What’s going on?” he asked Lee – though it was Tenten who answered.

“Sai’s art show is today, remember? Neji needs to look like he belongs there – and, for that matter, so do you.” Her gaze was arch and serious as it came to rest on Gaara, whose own stare was empty. Lee cocked his head and spread his hands, as though it would diffuse a bomb that hadn’t yet been built.

“You are coming with us, aren’t you?” Lee asked, leaning forward over the table. Tenten might have been the Slayer in charge of their shared armoury of stakes and daggers, but Lee kept his own arsenal of friendly smiles. It wasn’t phoney, not really – Lee genuinely did care about keeping the peace, and putting people at ease – but he would have had to have been as stupid as the Watchers’ Council thought he was not to know a façade of kindness was a weapon. Indeed, he watched Gaara’s eyes go doe-wide for the thousandth time in his ill-disguised surprise – _A dear in the headlights,_ thought Lee, with a note of Tenten’s signature snark – as his hands strayed to his starched collar, where his cravat had come slightly loose.

“I’d been fixing to interrogate Sai with my siblings,” he said, in the kind of way that meant he’d not thought anything of the sort until he was put on the spot. “After-hours.”

“Sure you did,” said Lee, as gently as he could. Warily, he offered Gaara his hand, pulling him along to Neji’s room (they shared a closet, seeing as Neji owned about two shirts). “I won’t have much that’ll fit you,” he was telling Gaara, “not now that Neji’s taken the last of my smaller clothes. But oversized is in – you’re welcome to anything.”

Gaara leaned uneasily against the doorframe, and while Lee had been chasing the half-thought that he might have been more comfortable in Neji’s room – all dark walls and old books – the shadows seemed only to press Gaara further into his shell. He had two moods, it seemed, murderous and maudlin, and they were equally vexing.

Lee could only busy himself with his own wardrobe. In the spring humidity, his hair threatened to go rogue; the new growth was tight. Gai had been encouraging him every day to go back to_ “natural,” _but his Slayer’s salary would hardly cover the products he’d need to let his hair recover from a decade of chemical straightening: Lee would content himself with a Mariners cap and a fervent prayer, for now. It was a process so involved he scarcely noticed when Gaara cleared his throat.

“Lee!”

Gaara’s nose wrinkled with his slight frown – and Lee’s did with his startled laughter. “Gods almighty,” he managed, “don’t you look . . . like . . . something.”

What he’d wanted to say was, _“Don’t you look like you just crawled out of Studio 54,” _but he wasn’t sure Gaara would understand the sentiment, much less appreciate it. Lee had quite forgotten he’d ever owned leather pants – they must have been from a Halloween costume – but sure enough, Gaara had dug them up to pair them with his black silks and his pensive frown. Lee watched that frown deepen into something stormy as Gaara crossed his arms across his chest, and tried to see if he could note any emotions moving through those pale eyes as he moved to toss Gaara his hoodie, ignoring the cool air on his skin as his shirt rode up. But Gaara’s eyes were as wintry as ever, and he pulled Lee’s sweater on as gingerly as he might have a hazmat suit.

“Better?” he wanted to know. Lee fished one of Tenten’s old makeup bags from the depths of the closet and thrust a stick of kohl toward him.

“More mall goth,” he admonished. Gaara had the good grace to accept that it was the best he would get.

Tenten and Neji would be going ahead as Lee helped Gai to the doctors’ for a regular check-up. Gaara would be sticking with their party. Lee insisted aloud it was because Gaara deserved to see Kurama’s charm by sunless daylight, and tried desperately to persuade himself it was because Gai was good company – but watching Tenten’s grip whiten around the doorknob and Neji glower as he kicked on his shoes, Lee knew it was because he didn’t trust Gaara alone with them. He might have been ready to accept a vampire into their fold, if only for now, but he feared neither Gaara’s help in finding a lead in Sai nor his apparent immunity to the weapon in question would stop Tenten from trying to stake him through the heart.

The university was, like most buildings in a town like Kurama, just off the highway, and Lee might not have noticed it at all without a hand-painted sign proclaiming it as such. The campus was just a collection of matching brick houses, rows of neat shrubs between their low red shapes turning the whole affair into something of a bar graph, etched neatly onto grid paper. Even the white gravel crunching beneath their feet was tidy and uniform, and stretched into the horizon as endlessly as the sea, or perhaps the great grass fields outside the town.

Lee found he couldn’t quite exhale even as they silently passed a great canvas banner announcing the exhibition. He felt as though he were looking at the world through something thick and viscous, like honey, or dish soap; that stickiness fixed his gaze on everything they passed – everything, that was, except Gaara, silent half a pace behind him. Every step they took only cemented the idea that he’d made the right choice: that Gaara was safer with him than with Tenten and Neji. But _should_ he have been? Even wrestled into a _Righteous Babe_ hoodie Lee had gotten last time Ani DiFranco had toured and with Pop-Tarts on his breath, Gaara was a walking warning.

The school’s gallery had bay windows, and it was dim enough outside for their reflections to be stark and immediate. Lee frowned at his own in a way he hadn’t since high school. It hadn’t changed much since then: he was still a Bauhaus building of a boy, right angles of his muscles jutting awkwardly from long limbs, his features wide and round against a jaw he’d yet to grow into. He was desperate, suddenly, to find some glaring flaw – something to fixate on as Gaara stood beside him, waiting patiently for his cue to contribute.

When it came as a half-smile, Gaara gave a polite nod. “We should go in,” he said, at last.

Lee struggled to make his own conversational skills dazzle. “Yeah,” he agreed, “let’s.”

Only one popular demographic rivalled the undead crawling beneath the endless cloud cover of the Northwest: liberal arts majors. It seemed well over half of Kurama’s eight thousand people had taken up residence in the spacious gallery, spirals of unisex raincoats and faded denim stretching a galaxy across the hardwood floors. Between the crush and the vibrant colours splattered almost aggressively across miles of murals and installations, it scarcely felt like Kurama anymore; Lee’s only reminder as to where he was, and why he was there, came in the form of a lithe vampire by his side, fingers cold where they brushed against his.

Lee jammed his hands into his pockets. “I’m pretty sure he’s a sophomore,” he said, of Sai. “Their stuff is in that corner, right?”

The sophomores’ _“stuff”_ did, indeed, take up the far right corner of the single-storey building, a labyrinth of screens put up to sport paintings that hadn’t quite warranted coveted wall hangings, and velvet ropes fencing in sculptures that were sure to break if anyone touched them. Most of it was what Lee had expected, abstraction and altruistic slogans fitted together with artistic abandon, but he found himself dwelling on the harsh white shapes breaking their lines. They were the only sculptures in the hall that seemed to exist without any concern for the other students’ works.

“Well, I’ll be.” Gaara let out a long, low whistle, that surprising humanity inching out of his alabaster shell once more. “Somebody’s been reading their scripture.”

They’d come to a halt at the base of the tallest of the great white sculptures; even without reading the plaque at the wall behind it, Lee recognised the myth. The Classic hero Perseus stood above them, holding the head of the gorgon Medusa aloft in a cruel-smiling triumph. That smile was all there was to see of his features: though the sculptor had clearly lavished over the ornate details of Perseus’ toga and the snakes in Medusa’s hair, their faces were blank, save their mouths.

“Lee,” said Gaara, suddenly, “look.”

Gaara had risen to the tips of his toes to point, and Lee had to strain just as hard to find what exactly he was supposed to see, the white clay blown into overexposure by the floodlights of the room. But sure enough, there they were:two tiny scars at the base of Perseus’ thick neck, and the unmistakable shape of feeding fangs bulging from Medusa’s flared cheeks. Only someone acquainted with the dead would have seen the features as anything beyond artistic liberty, and Lee felt his throat tighten.

“Again with the decapitation, huh?” he asked at last, trying for a joke. “Who knew Perseus had been trained as a Slayer?”

Gaara frowned, taking in the sculpture once more. “To be fair,” he mused, “beheading, immolation, and stakes through the heart kill _most_ things, living or not.”

_Not you, _thought Lee. He plastered a smile across his face all the same, and watched Gaara deflate at the sight of it. “Very true,” he lauded his companion, and turned stiffly on his heel. “Is this Sai’s, do you . . . oh, nope.” He narrowed his eyes at the plaque accompanying the statue. “This is by a ‘Deidara Yamanaka.’”

“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”

“Oh, gods almighty, Dei, get over yourself.”

Lee and Gaara whirled to balk as a pair of blonds wandered forward, melting gracefully from the crowd. It took Lee a minute to recognise Ino – not because he’d forgotten her, but because the man beside her was her mirror image. They had the same clean-cut features and both wore their hair long, and though she was scowling and he was sneering, Lee could see the both of them crafted their expressions with careful hauteur.

“My cousin,” Ino was saying, gesturing to who must have been Deidara half-apologetically. “Takes Sunday school way too seriously—”

“At least I bothered showing up!” sniffed Deidara, folding his arms across his chest. His eyes were narrowed to slits in his pale face, and Lee dove for the cover: he stepped neatly in front of Gaara, shielding him from view. He didn’t know what Deidara was, or who Kurama’s vampires were to him, but he would not take any chances.

“You’re quite the sculptor,” Lee was quick to cut in, flashing a toothy smile. “Really, this is, ah, lovely.” _“This” _made his skin crawl, but Deidara didn’t need to know that. “How are you liking the arts program?”

Deidara’s only answer was to drift back into the crowd, crowing loudly to another gaggle of onlookers, and Ino jeered after him. “Jackass,” she sighed, not unkindly. “I’m sorry, Lee. He isn’t usually so bad.”

Lee dismissed the notion with a wave of his hand. “Have you seen Sai?” he asked Ino instead. He tried for another smile, this one casual and knowing, as though the two of them were acquainted beyond the ghost story of a vampire’s murder.

Ino’s eyes were the same shade of icy blue as Gaara’s, Lee noted, and just as murky. “He was by the concessions, last I saw him,” she said, carefully. Her lips were drawn, as though she was about to say more, but it was over in an instant: she tossed her hair and brightened, all valley girl pep as she pressed on. “Who’s your friend?” she wanted to know, peering over Lee’s shoulder to wave to Gaara. “I don’t think I’ve seen him around—”

This time, Gaara was the one to take Lee’s hand, and Lee barely managed to choke out a _“He has to pee! Real bad!”_ before the crowd reached around them, pulling them in like a riptide.

Neji had explained to him, once, how the Revenant Infectious Pathogen either accelerated or decelerated (it had definitely _“‘celerated”_ somehow, Lee knew) cellular rebirth in humans, making them stronger and faster as vampires, beyond their functional immortality. While it certainly showed, in Gaara’s deft grace and easy strength, Lee knew that no disease could have propelled someone forward quite like this. Gaara’s shoulders had shot up to his ears, spine ramrod straight under the folds of his borrowed hoodie, and his steps were jerky, animatronic. It wasn’t often Lee struggled to keep up with someone, but his feet were a blur beneath him, now, and his words were breathless.

“What’s gotten into you?” he demanded, dogging at Gaara’s heels. He was met by stony silence, and he had to fight the scowl from his voice when he tried again. “Gaara, what the hell?”

“Not here.” Gaara’s grip was iron around Lee’s wrist, and Lee moved on instinct to pry his fingers from his skin – but after a moment, he slipped his palm into Gaara’s, and felt those cold fingers lace with his. Lee might not have been a stranger to Gaara’s wide-eyed _“beforeigner”_ shocks, not anymore, but this was the first time he saw it take on the cold edges of real fear. Gaara, he knew, needed all the anchors he could get.

Gaara was breathing hard when they came to a stop by an array of wooden benches and fold-out tables – a bake sale of some kind, Lee figured._ It can wait, though,_ he reminded himself, shepherding Gaara onto one of the benches. “Are you alright?” he finally asked. He certainly didn’t look it: his bloodless skin had gone whiter than Deidara’s sculpture, and his gaze flickered uneasily around the hall, catching the floodlights in such a way his eyes glittered. It was only after a minute before Lee realised why: realised they swam with unshed tears.

“My apologies,” muttered Gaara, clearing his throat. Lee pretended not to notice as he pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, busying himself with something _unduly_ fascinating on the edge of his sleeve. “I . . . that Deidara just . . . did you see what he was wearing?”

_ Double denim, _Lee remembered, but he doubted the protective gestures Gaara was drawing over his frame had much to do with outdated fashions (if for no other reason than that he, with his leather pants and cravat collection, wouldn’t have known what a sin double denim _was_). Gaara coughed once more before answering his own question.

“His pendant,” he said, slowly. “It bore was the sign of Jashin.”

Lee struggled to remember AP Religious Studies on the best of days, and trying now needled a headache into his temples with jarringly uneven stitches. “One of the old gods, right?” he asked. There’d been six of them, to hear the orthodox say it – hence the six-pointed star Neji wore – but to most of the reformers, those gods took a back seat to the twin sons of the devil, Kaguya, who’d come as Messiahs to earth to defeat her. The _mythos_ might have fascinated Lee more if it didn’t mostly serve to justify senior citizens’ homophobia.

“Not quite,” said Gaara. “Supposedly, Jashin was the third of the devils’ sons.”

“I thought there were only two of them.”

“Depends on who you ask.”

Lee was silent for a beat, fingers straying to his sleeve again, where a loose thread had begun to fray. “Ino _said_ he was a religious nut,” he recalled, “and that statue was pretty gods-tastic.” It was Gaara’s turn to look to his sleeves, and Lee twisted his lips into a smile as he scrambled for something else to say. “But you can just admit that you got wigged by the religious symbolism. I’m a Slayer, remember? I know that stuff is hard on vamps.”

“That’s a myth,” protested Gaara, but Lee would have none of it.

“I know so much about vampires,” he decided to boast, “that it’s scary: scarier than you guys could ever be. For instance, did you know that, uh, you lot are all . . . Republicans? Because it’s true. Every vampiric citizen of our great country is registered to vote for Danzo Shimura’s re-election. Ooh! Or did you know that every member of Green Day is a vampire? What about NSYNC? And—”

By the time Lee stoped to catch his breath, Gaara had doubled over himself in laughter. Lee didn’t think he’d ever heard him laugh before. It was an airy, fleeting sound; Lee was struck, then, by the idea that if Gaara hadn’t been a vampire, he would have liked hanging out with him, if for no other reason than that his laugh was so very contagious: dancing over him like a cool breeze.

“I didn’t understand half of what you said,” sighed Gaara, leaning back against the bench. For a moment, a crooked smile hung on his face – but the frown to replace it was small and even. “You’re kind,” he said, to Lee. It wasn’t exactly a question, and Lee didn’t exactly answer, sitting on his hands as Gaara went on. “You’re kind to _me_.”

“I tried to kill you, that one time,” Lee pointed out. Gaara didn’t seem to hear him.

“Look at them,” he was saying. He shifted against the bench to gesture to the cloud of college kids milling about the gallery, his movements far quicker and surer than his halting words. Lee wondered, absentmindedly, if he noticed, and if he wished that preternatural grace would ever retire. “None of them have any idea,” he mumbled, “not about any of it. They . . . they have no idea what _I _am.”

Even when Lee straightened, Gaara was still an inch taller than him, and his posture was imperious; Lee decided he’d settle for a disarming smile. “Most of your kind wouldn't hesitate to _teach_ them what you were,” he stated, flatly, as though he simply meant to pick on Gaara for being a redneck. But he felt his gaze harden as he drifted from the bench, beckoning Gaara forward. “But you aren’t like the others, are you?”

Gaara stood uneasily, and on instinct, Lee offered him his hand once more. Twin spots of red had risen in the blur of the crowd: Lee knew even before he saw them that Tenten and Neji were snaking toward them, and he was sure they’d be pulling Sai alongside them. He revelled in that certainty. Lee knew his friends – his family – like he did his own heartbeat (medicinally lopsided though it was). But Gaara might have been any one of the collages or paintings littering the gallery, then: he was just red hair and blue eyes and white skin, an abstract mess of colours that Lee, a far cry from the art students around him, didn’t hope to unravel.

“In more ways than one,” said Gaara, in the end. Lee had already moved on, mustering up the brightest smile he could.

“Glad we had this chat. But come on,” he called, waving to the crowd, “we’re wasting daylight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ya i love naruto. all those ninjas. there’s nardso . . . sauce cakes . . . token girl . . . and *looks at writing on hand* ꧁𝓡𝑜𝒸𝓀 𝓛𝓮𝓮꧂


	5. Cornflake Boy

“What do the rainbow flags mean?”

“They’re, ah, pride flags. Naruto was gay.”

“‘Gay?’ As in, happy?”

Lee frowned, thinking back to the first and only time he’d met Naruto Uzumaki: of him standing ground on the rickety steps of his porch, watery eyes narrowed and lips pressed thin. Whatever storms had been churning inside him had strained against the confines of his skin, and he’d held himself stiffly, as though he’d known they were only ever moments away from ripping him apart at the seams. To say he’d died a happy man felt, to Lee, glaringly inaccurate.

_ But he was in love, _Lee reminded himself, working his hands from his pockets. With a vampire, of course, but he’d had the luck to be in love nonetheless.

When he turned to see Gaara staring down at him, Lee gave a sharp exhale, before jamming his hands in his pockets once more. “‘Gay’ means homosexual,” he explained, at last. “Naruto loved other men, and his sexuality was important to him. The rainbow flags are a symbol celebrating that.”

“He was brave,” said Gaara, suddenly. “To be open about it. In my day, he’d’ve faced hell and high water for . . . for all that.” His voice was breathless, and Lee bit back a bitter laugh, twisting sincerity into his words.

“That’s just as much a product of your state as it is your time,” he told Gaara. “Suna’s . . . ”

There was a lot to say about Suna – about the deep South in general – but Lee felt his voice taper off as Gaara edged in front of him, craning his neck to take in the rainbow banners around the room. “Gay pride,” he mused. The silence to follow was deafening.

The closest Kurama had to a real community centre was the Y, and the Young Men’s Chunin Association was a shadow of its Village People theme song in the midmorning dim. Senior citizens in flowery swim caps and muscle-bound Lycra enthusiasts gawked at the main lobby as they passed it, taking in the pride flags and the fresh-laid geometric carpet with wrinkled noses. The crowd they’d assembled was an army of teens and twenty-somethings, all too young to be so jaded, and definitely – this, Lee had overheard an elderly couple complain when he’d been standing in line for the vending machine – too scantily clad for what the YMCA’s schedule had penned as a _“memorial service.”_

Ino had spent the entire _vernissage_ debating anyone who would listen on the merit of the term. She felt it a needlessly morose description of her event, and begged attendees not to wear black, insisting there were far better things to wear on _“such a lovely Sunday.” _Though Sunday had brought with it a fresh crop of rain clouds, windblown trees rubbing elbows with sparks of static, Lee was inclined to agree with the overall sentiment. Gathered as they were, in odd clumps and rings, their Technicolor Sunday best made them seem like bunches of cheery flowers, waiting to be folded into bouquets or strung onto _lei_s. Even the all-Aerosmith soundtrack groaning over the loudspeakers (admittedly one of the late Sasuke’s _better _mixtapes) didn’t seem too gloomy when paired with neon Jordans.

“Excuse me – Lee?”

“Huh?”

Lee’s own Jordans squeaked as he whirled around, despite the carpeting, and he felt half a gasp catch on the edges of his ribs as he stiffened. The pale figure hovering before him seemed nonplussed. Behind a curtain of glossy black hair, his gaze was hopelessly bored.

“Tenten Sherpa told me to find you,” he drawled, toying with the syllables. “Or, she told me to find – her words, mind you – ‘Killer B’s hotter stunt double’ and ‘his new bestie, Gloomy with the Good Hair.’ Hey,” he added, brightening as he turned to Gaara, “didn’t I sell you blow the other day?”

“Nope,” said Gaara, too quickly. “Definitely not. Don’t do drugs.” He coughed out the mantra so readily it was as though someone had pulled a string in his back, _Toy Story _style. Lee felt a flicker of pride ignite at his core. They’d shown up to the Y early, and he’d been quick to insist Gaara read a few self-help manuals. Between them and _The Young and the Restless_, Lee could think of no more concise guide to the lives and times of the end of the twentieth century. Even his wardrobe had been overhauled – though Tenten hadn’t been thrilled to wind up removing all the spy mics from the clothes they’d donated to the vamps.

The stranger didn’t seem to care much either way. “I’m Sai,” he explained. He frowned as he said it. Lee supposed he wasn’t exactly in the business of introducing himself. “Tenten told me your little gang was investigating Sasuke’s death. Said you might have some questions.”

“That’s one way to put it,” said Lee, carefully, but Gaara beat him to the punch. His lips twitched, as though he were trying for a flinty smile . . . and then they parted over his gleaming white fangs, dull crunching sounds warring against _Dream On_’s bassline as his feeding teeth jut forward, too. They disappeared as quickly as they’d come, but for the first time, Sai’s glassy features were etched with real emotion – real fear.

“We know what he was,” said Gaara, patting at his lips delicately with a crumpled napkin. Hoping Sai wouldn’t notice, Lee pulled a grimace. His throat was too dry for him to swallow, and his tongue was sandpaper as it twisted into his cheek. He’d been the one to suggest they play the vampire card with Sai, to prompt him into telling the whole truth, whatever it may have been – but that didn’t mean that the plan didn’t make him feel just a bit sick.

“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” Sai’s long fingers were stained with paint, but Lee could only think of blood when his hands strayed to his neck, crushed carmine a stark contrast to white, scarred skin. He shook his head slightly as he searched for his next words. “Well,” Sai began, at last, “I met Sasuke two years ago, when I was in my senior year and trying to scrape some cash together for college.”

“And you thought dealing drugs was a good student job?” Lee felt a furrow carve between his brows, lashes brushing at his browbones as he blinked, blinked, blinked. Sai rolled his eyes.

“I sure did,” he snapped. “And now I’m a sophomore, _and_ in Kappa Pi. Anyway—” here, he shot a furtive glance over his shoulder, scanning the perimeter “—we were all working under this kingpin named Orochimaru, until he got arrested – for _drunk driving_, mind you: we would never get caught.” He straightened, smug, but deflated again when he saw neither Lee nor Gaara mirrored his tiny smirk. “Well, I mostly did delivery jobs, ‘cause I didn’t want to get too involved with the high level stuff – plausible deniability, y’know? So I was kinda wigged when Sasuke first called me up for a private meeting last winter. Thought I was done for, somehow.” Sai didn’t look like he’d ever thought anything of the sort: he had the slow, easy confidence of an old alleycat, or an A-list backup dancer. “But then he gave me the whole Fangs McGee spiel. He said his boyfriend’d been his old drone – that’s what he called us, ‘drones’ – but that he’d got sick, and so Sasuke needed a new, like, blood donor.”

“Naruto was sick?” Lee’s stomach had been in knots before, and it was twisting into a sheepshank, now, a Boy Scout’s wet dream and worst nightmare all at once. “Was it . . . ”

_Was it AIDS? _There were a lot of words Lee had sworn never to say, but there were few he felt he physically couldn’t. When Sai shook his head, Lee felt he might very well have wept in relief – until he remembered the man was still dead.

“Some kinda blood cancer,” said Sai. “Polycythemia, I think. Sasuke didn’t say much, but I, ah, I did some reading.” He spread his hands. “Even though your lot—“” he gestured to Gaara with a sneer that flickered between derisive and defensive “—need to feed on haemoglobin, too much is still toxic. Something about chakra, like. But Sasuke wouldn’t leave him, all the same. He decided he’d try and cure Naruto himself: he was trying to drain the excess blood from him, and he needed to dilute it with healthy blood from, well, me.”

Lee felt like he’d been hit by a baseball bat, or by any one of the thousands of barbells lining the walls of the YMCA. “He was trying to . . . to _cure _him?” he echoed, dully. _Why? _It would have been one thing to hear – in some feel-good magazine story or page six snippet – that an ordinary area man had wound up risking his life to save his lover’s. But to hear of a vampire risking its – his – _un_-life to do the same seemed . . .

. . . Well, it seemed human.

Suddenly, the holy water at Lee’s belt seemed to burn through the flask, and eat at his skin like acid.

“One last thing.” Gaara’s soft drawl didn’t so much pull Lee out of his reverie as it did coax him forward, harmlessly insistent as a prairie tumbleweed. “Did anyone in your . . . organisation . . . ever mention anything relating to the name ‘Jashin?’”

“‘Juicin’?” Sai batted his lashes coyly, but the look in his eyes was genuinely lost. “What’s that?”

It was Gaara’s turn to balk, and Lee forced himself to straighten, imagining his spine as a set of Lincoln Logs as he made to stand solidly once more. “Nothing important,” he told Sai, flashing Gaara a warning look. “But thank you for being so forthcoming with us.”

“No problem,” said Sai, rocking back on his heels. Lee and Gaara had already crossed the floor by the time he called out once more. “Hey, you guys looking to join the business? We’re always looking for new runners!”

Lee felt the grin dance across his muscles in his cheeks before it lit up his face. “What do you think?” he asked Gaara. “Should we ditch the investigation and start dealing coke with Sai?”

“Not a chance,” sniffed Gaara. His smile moved much like the spring itself: first, it came slowly, then all at once, filling so suddenly with life it was startling. “I read that pamphlet, and it was real clear on one thing. _Don’t_ do drugs.”

“Hey, do your siblings know that you’re here?”

Neji, Lee knew, had suffered through enough bat mitzvahs with enough of his cousins to know to play up a polite disinterest: his white eyes were wide behind his tinted glasses, lips carefully pursed as he slipped on a pair of latex gloves. Since they’d first met him in middle school, Lee had known Neji to hold a patent on _“cool and collected”_ – but he fell just shy of the mark now; his hands shook around the needle as he lifted it to a dim halogen light.

“No,” said Gaara, after a beat. “Why do you ask?”

When Neji’s only answer was to slide a fresh syringe onto the needle’s base, Tenten spoke up. “Because this is going to hurt,” she said, “and we _don’t _want an army of the undead busting down the lab.”

“What’s gonna hurt— _ow_!”

Tenten laughed without any mirth, and Lee glared at her, feeling his stare chill the space between them even as he stuck out his tongue to soften the look. Only Neji was impassive, calmly sliding the vial of thick black blood to a stand on the lab bench. “Five more,” he told Gaara. “Six, if you tick me off.”

On a Sunday night, still a month shy of spring exams, the medical labs of the local university were deserted, cavernous with the lights turned low and bright blue shoe covers dotting the linoleum like so many plastic stalagmites. Neji wasn’t technically a student, but he did enough of his research out of the university’s labs to have his own key card, and to know its layout far better than Lee suspected he did the back of his hand. He wasn’t sure Neji’s self-assured poise really translated into the authority with which he told them all to _“sit wherever,”_ but he was hardly going to complain: Lee couldn’t remember the last time he’d found a perch as comfortable as the one he had hanging upside down off a lab bench.

Even as Lee lounged across the whitewashed tabletop, though, he felt worry nipping at his stretched-out heels. Gaara’s eyes were so wide he could see the whites all around their cornflower-blue irises, and he gripped at the arms of his chair so tightly the screws squeaked. Lee tried to signal to him. _“Sorry,”_ he wanted to say, offering wide, pleading eyes. He doubted Gaara saw them – or anything, really, other than the decilitres of blood Neji was drawing from his arm.

“Hey! You said only five more!”  
“I said six if you ticked me off,” Neji reminded Gaara, passing him a cotton wad to press to his elbow. “Which, by the way, you do constantly. But this is a new test.” He procured a new syringe from his lab coat with a flourish. “And a new . . . _needle_!”

“Gods all-_fuckin_’-mighty!” Gaara leapt so suddenly from his chair it clattered the floor behind him, and Neji swore loudly as this new needle dislodged from Gaara’s wrist, the half-filled vial shattering against the floor.

“Yo! Good going, Beverly Hillbilly!” Lee didn’t have to look up to know Tenten was rolling her eyes. “We’ll have to take another one, now.”

“But,” Lee was quick to cut in, reaching his hand toward Gaara’s arm, “it’ll be the last one, right, guys?”

Neji looked like he wanted to jab the needle into Gaara’s eye, but he relented with a sigh. “It’s the most important one,” he explained, twisting his lemon-sucking grimace into something carefully neutral. “We’re taking tests for blood culture – that’s these two – a karyotype, an FBC . . . ” He seemed to be listing them mostly for his own benefit, his gaze softening as it skipped over each neatly labelled vial. Though his heart hammered at his ribs, Lee smiled over at his old friend. He loved to see him so in his element – even if his element was a once-sterilised lab with blood just _everywhere_. “But to take your blood gases, we need to take blood from the artery at your wrist.”

“Blood . . . ‘gases?’” Gaara shook his head. “Y’all know the Galen humours aren’t _real_, right?”

Even Lee had to balk at that. “Where have you _been _since the Civil War?” he asked. Once more, Tenten cut in:

“He’s been in Suna. _Duh_.”

Chatter flowed easily between them, for the most part, but Lee couldn’t be sure if it halted over the broken glass on the floor or over Gaara’s stiff frame. He’d agreed warily to medical testing for Neji’s Watcher logs, once Lee had explained the work his friend had led in researching the Revenant Infectious Pathogen, and how he’d revolutionised the Slaying field. Still, none of them had thought to tell Gaara about the needles. It had seemed so obvious: how else would one draw blood?

“Open wide,” called Neji, before snapping a mask over his mouth. When he spoke again, his voice was muffled by the thin paper. “Lee, some help?” _“Shum helpf?”_

Wordlessly, Lee moved to Gaara’s side, and Neji gave them both a sharp nod. “Fangs out,” he instructed Gaara. “And I’m warning the both of you now – I rented a documentary on venom milking, but I was only half-listening to it, so I’m winging this.”

Gaara’s face hadn’t quite gone back to normal, but when he turned toward Lee, the corners of his lips were twitching. Lee beamed back, hoping his silent laughter was somehow still visible. Then, for the second time that day, Lee rolled his lips as Gaara began to shift.

The crunching of those new, auxiliary bones grinding against his skull seemed to fill the room with the same monstrous avarice the feeding fangs did his mouth. Unlike the display he’d given Sai, though, Gaara didn’t stop at a toothy grin, not this time. He screwed his eyes shut in concentration as his features continued to writhe, his jaw cracking forward to let his fangs take centre stage.

Lee had followed Neji to Blockbuster last night, when they’d decided to run these tests on Gaara, and he’d rented his own documentary while they were there: an_ Animal Planet _feature on the monsters of the prehistoric deep. Gaara reminded him now of the spiral-jawed shark _Helicoprion_, with teeth like a buzzsaw. (Nature was _so _beautiful.) The sight was a far cry from the Anne Rice-brand fantasies to so dominate trashy romance novels, and Lee felt the ghost of his earlier laughter sour at the base of his throat.

“All right, open wide, vampy,” called Neji, sliding a sheet of cling wrap over a beaker. With a blow as decisive as any Slayer’s, he jabbed a plastic straw into the film, and nodded to Lee. “Hands on either side of his cheeks,” he explained, tersely. “Can you feel any hollows? Those’ll be where the RIP made the skull shift over the venom glands. You want to squeeze down on those . . . ”

Awkwardly, Lee moved behind Gaara, resting his hands where Neji had told him to. Gaara’s skin was cool and chalky-soft, if thin over the sharp ridges of his bones. Lee found himself sucking in his stomach as Gaara leaned back against him, biting back his thousandth half-reluctant smile where Gaara’s hair tickled against his core.

“Got it?” asked Neji. Lee rolled his lips, and blinking affirmation down at Gaara – whose gaze had gone chillingly blank – he let his touch wander across his cheeks, feeling for rivets and ravines. “Got it,” he confirmed. Once more, Neji nodded.

“Bite.”

With Lee pressing down as hard as he could on Gaara’s high cheekbones – and Tenten egging them all on with eager cries of _“Ooh, gross!”_ – the beaker filled quickly with a clear, purple-tinted liquid, cloudy where inky blood struggled from Gaara’s gums. By the time Lee had let go, and Gaara had swallowed back his fangs, all of them were doubled over, breathless between gagging and giggling.

“Nicely done, General Hospital,” laughed Tenten, as Neji peeled the gloves, limp and sticky with sweat, from his hands. She squealed as he slapped them toward her, lunging for the beaker of vampire venom. “Don’t even,” she warned him, waving the beaker in his face. “I’ll pour this on you, you just watch me!”

“Oh, I don’t think so!”

Gaara’s voice took them all by surprise, if Neji stumbling backward and Tenten gasping was anything to go by. But his smile was wider than Lee had ever seen it, and when he laughed that dry, breezy laugh, it was hard not to get swept up. “Throw all the venom you’d like,” he goaded Tenten, “but I’ll have you know that’s _my _area of expertise!” He tapped his sharp canine with a long finger, and his wolfish grin was brilliant even in the dim of the lab.

“What?” Lee feigned shock, pressing his hands to his chest. “You’re siding with _Neji_, Gaara?”

“Damn right I am. He’s the one with all the needles!”

“With me, Tenten! Double trouble!” Lee vaulted over the nearest table, and he caught Gaara’s eye as he twisted his wobbly landing into a hasty back handspring: one of those kung fu movie moves that never came in handy, but also never failed to dazzle. She was just as fierce, throwing fierce punches like confetti through the cool air, and peppering her shouts with those college cheerleader high-kicks.

“Think you can take on two _Slayers_, do you, Neji? Mr. Brideshead Re-dick-ited?” Tenten grinned wildly. “And what about you, Scarlett O’_Gaara_? Do you have what it takes?” 

“Oh, please,” chuckled Gaara, “y’all ain’t never dealt with someone like me before. Why, I, ah . . . I reckon I was fighting varmints before you were knee-high on a grasshopper!” His vowels were long and prowling, his consonants tacked to extreme as he amped that Southern twang up to the max. Then he gave his summer-wind laugh again, and Lee looked between them – between his oldest friend and someone who might have been his newest – with the widest grin of them all. He hadn’t been so light in weeks, laughter fizzing in his throat like so much soda.

The levity, Lee was quick to find, had expert timing. It was far easier to jump out of the way of projectiles when he didn’t feel like his ribs were made of lead!

“Lee, cover me!”

Lee had been in motion before Tenten had even shouted, knocking the wadded-up latex glove out of the air with a showy roundhouse kick. Neji was glowering in frustration, but his grin came back quickly enough. After all, he had vampiric strength on his side: Gaara threw the sticky plastic like each piece was a Major League fastball. His onslaught was relentless, and Lee felt his lungs begin to burn as he scrambled to keep up, shielding Tenten as she folded paper from the recycling bin into tiny bullets. She launched them with deadly accuracy, and before long, the lab was a war zone. _The Gettysburg of garbage,_ thought Lee, to a chorus of gleeful shrieks.

“Had enough?” called Tenten. She and Lee had taken control of the entire far half of the lab, tables rolled in front of them like a wall as they flung wadded-up graphs and old cardboard boxes from the recycling bins.

“Never!” Neji jeered, peeking out from behind Gaara’s fighting stance. Their territory had leapt to include the sink, and they’d taken to filling latex gloves up like water balloons – deadlier than their trash papers, Lee knew, if so much slower on the reload. It was en route back toward the sink that Lee saw Neji stiffen, face gaunt in the shadows crisscrossing the lab. “Did you hear that?” he asked. Lee frowned, trying to keep his tone light.

“We won’t fall for that—” he began, before Gaara bristled as well. He craned his neck back, sticking his nose in the air like a bloodhound.

“No,” he said, tersely. He and Neji spoke at the same time: “Someone’s coming.”

“Hide!” called Lee. Instinct had a strangling hold on his voice, but his mind was reeling right alongside it. With syringes littered across overturned tables and Gaara clutching at his elbow, they’d have looked like tweakers, at best – but if their run-in with Sai was any indication, the truth was out there; any shadow of it would have plunged them right intoa worst-case scenario.

Gaara seemed to understand, and Lee matched his pensive frown as he clambered under the sink, letting Tenten kick a chair in front of his huddled form. Shooting a wary glance to Lee, she took one of the water-balloon-gloves in her hands again._ “Act normal,” _she signalled. Lee snatched an old lab report from the bench beside him, but it felt like wrestling sheet metal as he tried to fold it into a paper airplane.

“What’s going on in here?”

The voice was brassy, and it clattered against the light fixtures. Lee didn’t look over his shoulder to call back. “We’re having a garbage fight!” he announced, forcing a smile. “Why, you wanna join?”

“I think I’ll pass, son.”

_I’m not your son. _Lee turned stiffly on his heel, drawing his borrowed lab coat tighter over his (very pink) (Ani DiFranco-emblazoned) T-shirt. “How can we help you, sir?” Lee asked, swallowing back any last traces of inner-city Konohagakure from his voice. It was second nature, when speaking with strangers – and when this one drew a gleaming gold badge from his belt, Lee feared the choice might have just saved his life.

“I’m with the FBI,” said the stranger. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man who seemed to have gone grey early, salt-and-pepper hair scraped back from his forehead with more goo than the Kids’ Choice Awards. His voice was vaguely slimy, too: he spoke with a Southern accent as lazy and sticky as dish soap, and his smile slid easily on and off. “I was told I could find Neji Hyuga here.”

“That’d be me.” Neji made a show of stumbling from his chair, padding awkwardly between Lee and Tenten. “Who’s asking?” he asked, and sneered right on cue when the FBI man drew a business card from his immaculate trench coat. “I can’t see, _sir_,” he snapped. Those white eyes were narrow. “I’m legally blind.”

“Oh. Of course.” Lee straightened as he watched the FBI man’s sleazy smile dip, if only for a second. His ashen complexion seemed to edge into pallor as he fidgeted with a flashy tie: navy silk that gleamed oil-slick bright when the man turned to catch the fading daylight. His suit was fine-combed grey wool, and Lee had to note he was remarkably well-dressed for a civil servant. “I’m Tobirama Senju,” he read from the business card.

“‘Senju?’ Any relation to _Tsunade_ Senju?” Tenten had procured a stick of gum (Lee hoped it was gum) from her own lab coat, and she popped a loud bubble at the tail end of the question. “We love _Baywatch_,” she added, batting her eyes.

The FBI man – Senju – merely sniffed. “I’m here to investigate the recent murder,” he told the group. Lee arched an eyebrow.

“Which one?”

“Naruto Uzumaki,” answered Senju, too quickly. “I was informed by the local sheriff that you’d been poking around the morgue recently, Mr. Hyuga.”

“It’s _Dr._ Hyuga,” said Neji, loudly. Technically, it wasn’t yet – his _viva voce _wasn’t scheduled until September – but the more important message came in the form of his warning look, shot over his shoulder at the sink behind them all. Lee understood immediately. They all knew full well the FBI man was covering for something – Neji had been spying on Sasuke Uchiha’s severed head, after all, not Naruto’s – but Neji would take point, so that Lee and Tenten could smuggle Gaara (paperless and likely legally dead) from the premises. Lee took a tiny step back as Neji sauntered forward, complaining all the while: “ . . . interrupting _grad research_,” he was crowing. “Let’s take this outside, shall we? You’re not even wearing shoe covers, and I’d like to avoid _further _contaminating _my_ lab . . . ”

Lee counted, carefully – _five, six, seven_ – until only the stony undertones of Neji’s voice carried down the hall, and until he couldn’t distinguish fading footsteps from the wind outside. He turned slowly on one squeaking heel to beckon Gaara forward.

“Y’all—” Gaara began, but Tenten was quick to cut him off, slapping her hand over his mouth.

“Lab coat on and hood up,” she hissed. She popped briefly to her feet to yank a pair of safety glasses from the rack on the wall, and jammed them over her face. “We’ll shed a layer every block until we’re onto Church Street, and then we’ll take back alleys home.”

“But—” Gaara spoke testily around Tenten’s fingers, but this time, Lee shut him up, fixing him with a stare he hoped was equal parts withering and apologetic. Judging from the distaste flickering across Gaara’s features, it was neither.

“The bureau will have been brought in by the police department,” he explained nonetheless, shrugging off his own lab coat to pull a jacket on beneath it. “So they’ll have a squad with them whenever an agent enters the field. There’s . . . ” He craned his neck toward the window, where he could just make out a flank of bland Subarus lining the lab parking lot. “There’s, like, six undercover vehicles out there. We’ve got to keep you under their radar – and frankly,it’s _got_ to be us. Tenten and I have a lot more cover than you do, since we’re actually legal citizens of the town. And the century.”

Lee hadn’t seen Gaara wear such a flinty glare since they’d first met: when Lee, convinced that Naruto was under attack, had driven a stake into Gaara’s heart. The room was already bitterly cold, air conditioners on full blast despite the spring chill, but the air was balmy in comparison to his icy blue eyes.

“Fine,” he muttered, at last. “We do this your way.”

Tenten couldn’t resist a gibe. “There’s literally only _ever_ our way.”

For all the sunshine and summery laughter he’d been filled with during the garbage fight, Gaara reminded Lee of an iceberg as they raced back to the apartment: he was stubborn and slow-moving, and so very, very cold. Tenten, on the other hand, had never looked so alive. She’d gone full Bond Girl, darting behind benches and lampposts as they wound through the brisk spring air; her tone was terse as she barked out orders she didn’t look back to deliver. Caught between them, Lee felt his heart in his throat. He might technically have been in second place, but with that fiery desperation ahead of him only just stalled by the icy wall behind them both, he felt he was pretty decidedly losing the race.

“What’s gotten into you three?”

Gai’s back issue of _Sports Illustrated _fluttered to the tabletop like a wounded bird as it fell from his hands, and he jerked the chair out of the kitchen to beckon Lee, Gaara, and Tenten inside. “You look . . . ” He frowned, seeming to think better of the comment. “I’ll put on some tea,” he decided instead. “Lee, son, would you fetch the good oolong for me?”

Tenten was taller than Lee was – and it was her tea, besides – but he recognised the wary edge to his foster father’s words. His footfalls were silent as he padded back into the kitchen, stretching to reach the cupboard’s top shelf. Gai watched with a grave frown. “If that boy,” he hissed, gesturing to Gaara, “has gotten you two in trouble in any way, then so help me _Kaguya_ . . . ”

Lee flinched at the Devil’s name, and shook his head fervently as he scrabbled for the Mason jar they kept their looseleaf in. “It isn’t Gaara,” he was quick to insist. “It’s—”

“FBI! Open up!”

“Shit!” Lee’s fingers flew from the jar as he started, and he braced himself on instinct, waiting for the sound of shattering glass – but it never came. Gai had folded all the way over in his wheelchair, one hand planted on the floor for support and the other resting beneath the jar.

“Go get that,” he told Lee. Wordlessly, he twisted himself back upright, and wheeled slowly back toward the discarded magazine.

“ . . . already duked it out with your partner, Special Agent _Fail _Cooper.” Tenten. Her voice filled the tiny apartment and tumbled down the stairwell, and under it, Lee felt as though he were struggling to move: in a few short hours, he’d forgotten the leaden weight dread lay on his limbs, forgotten how fear dragged him down like an anchor. “So why don’t you tell us why _you’re_ here, huh?”

The figure in the doorway was another younger man warring against grey hair – but his roots were coming in dark, and Lee could see old scars where he suspected the agent had once worn metal gauges jabbed through eyebrows and nostrils. (The eighties, Lee remembered, had been an adventurous time for many a young rock-n’-roll fan.) _An ex-punk, then, _he noted. He and folded his arms against his chest as he came to stand behind Tenten. This stranger lacked the solid, steadfast strength of that other agent: instead, he was stooped with fatigue.

“Ma’am,” he groaned, sounding the word out like an insult, “I _don’t_ know what you’re talking about.” He frowned, straightening his tie – a faded blue check, fraying under the simple knot. “I’d like to have a few words with a one Neji Hyuga,” he went on, flashing his badge and ID. _“Kakashi Hatake,”_ Lee read. “Do you know where I might find him?”

“Last we saw him, he was with you,” said Lee slowly. “Or, that is, your . . . your partner.” But as he said the words, they seemed to curdle, scraping hard edges against a tongue that felt like cotton. He watched Kakashi stifle a sigh.

“Forgive my foster kids, they’ve been busy this weekend. They helped organise poor Naruto Uzumaki’s memorial, you know.”

Lee and Tenten had been enlisted by Ino to lift heavy things, and not much else, but they both straightened at Gai’s voice. He offered Kakashi a brilliant smile – one Lee noticed had earned a full-page spread in the copy of _Sports Illustrated _Gai held, folded open to the portrait. “Maito Gai,” he said, as though it really needed explaining. “I was Neji’s legal guardian until he came of age. Can we take these questions outside?”

“Whatever,” said Kakashi. He closed the door behind them.

He was the only one to sound so calm. As soon as the door clicked shut, Lee collapsed against it, bringing his hands to his hair. “Shit!” he said again. When nobody answered, he tried again. “Shit, shit, shit!” His pulse had shifted into hummingbird overdrive, heart pounding so hard and so fast he felt it might very well achieve liftoff. “What the hell is going on?”

“That first guy wasn’t FBI,” Tenten declared, pushing off from the wall. “Think about it! Way too well-dressed, missing the facts—”

“Oh, gods almighty! So _now _you get it?”

He’d been so quiet Lee had all but forgotten he was there, but sure enough, Gaara had burst from the kitchen, jaw clenched and fangs bristling. He had just enough blood in his system for his cheeks to pinken with the ghost of a flush, and Lee saw his eyes were glittering dangerously.

“That’s what I kept trying to _tell_ you two,” he cried, sinking to his knees beside Lee. “That man was no ‘Senju,’ no . . . no _constable_ at all. He . . . ” Lee felt his heart, still tapping out that foxtrot, lurch in fear as Gaara spoke around a sob.

“His name is Hidan,” he said at last, drawing a deep, shuddering breath. “And he’s the vampire who sired me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 200 hits . . . thats lit rally madness luvs x
> 
> seriously though, thank you all so much for taking a chance on this fic! every time i get a tungle notification that someone rb’ed the link and wrote something in the tags – or even left a whole ass comment here (you know who you are and you know i love you!) – i totally get the warm and fuzzies. hope you're all in this for the long haul cuz the next chapter is gonna be . . . a lot
> 
> xx


	6. You Oughta Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is a frankenchapter, so it's dummy long – and it also gets quite bloody and violent toward the end. reader discretion is advised.

Lee didn’t like the word_ “hate.” _He felt it was used far too liberally by far too many people, and that modern society had let it lose its meaning: that they’d created a world where a distaste for Lunchables was somehow comparable to lifelong dreads and grudges; where people threw on and took off incomparable anger like they might have their favourite jacket on a Saturday night. Most people, thought Lee, would never even _know_ true hate, and he truly hoped they would never have to.

That being said, he was ready to shove an entire frying pan down Neji’s throat.

“ . . . he’s put us all in danger,” Neji was going on. His cheeks were crimson, struggling toward carmine, cochineal – every other shade of red Lee had ever seen in a Crayola two-hundred-crayon set – and his eyes were pale and bright as tiny moons. “And you think we should let him stay?”

“I _think_ you should actually speak to him, rather than about him!” Lee hovered defensively behind Gaara’s chair, and he watched his knuckles flash white where he clutched at the tabletop. “Gaara, come on. Talk to us.”

But Gaara had fallen silent, ever since he’d said those few fateful words: ever since he’d announced that his sire was hot on his trail. He was ghoulish and cadaverous under the kitchen’s mottled shadows, but his icy eyes shone like beacons through the murk, the dim moonlight catching on unshed tears. Tenten sat at his side, and she shook, ever so slightly, in her seat – not with fear, but anger. Her palms were dark with an angry flush as she clenched and unclenched her fists, manicured nails leaving tiny crescent welts in the skin there.

Still, she had the good head to be silent. Neji, on the other hand, had come in just in time to see Gai lead Kakashi out the door – the poor FBI agent had been bowled over by Gai’s blustering charm (and insistence to couple his legal statement with baby pictures) and they were off to take their discussion at an all-night café – and armed with Tenten’s message of _“urgnt! g-man’s sire vamp iz here” _to his pager, he’d started yelling as soon as he’d set foot on the stairwell.

“This was fishy to start with,” Neji was grousing, “and now it’s a whole damned aquarium. How do we know he didn’t lead this Hidan here himself? To get us off the trail? Off the mortal freakin’ _coil_?”

“What are you saying now, Neji?” Lee felt as though his friend’s every word was another lead weight dropped on his head. His skull was set to crack like an egg any minute, and his brains already half-scrambled under the pressure.

Neji only folded his arms. When he spoke again, his voice shook with ill-contained rage.

“I’m saying we have no way of knowing that this Mystery Machine detective dream team isn’t a hoax – that Gaara and his siblings aren’t here to _kill us_.”

_Say something, say something, say something. _Lee hardly dared look down at Gaara, but he could see both their reflections in Gaara’s untouched tea. His own expression was hardly a foreign one, but Lee’s blood ran cold at the sight of it all the same: his eyes were half-moons as he glared, his jaw twitching. Gaara, for his part, was impossibly still; if he had enough blood for it to chill, it scarcely showed. All that moved was his gaze, flickering from side to side like a lizard’s.

Lee let himself thin his lips, searching desperately for some scrap of his own calm. “Gaara’s had ample opportunity to kill us over this last week and a half,” he told Neji tightly. “So what do they get by dragging it all out?”

“What do _you_ get from—”

“_Enough_!”

Tenten whirled from her seat, and Lee scrambled to get out of her way, spine connecting solidly with the rusty dials on their stove. Neji was not so lucky. As he padded backward, Lee watched his side clip the countertop, and he crumpled to the floor. In that instant, he seemed just a blind little boy again: his eyes were wide and his movements frantic as he struggled to reacquaint himself with the map of the apartment stored way back in his memory. But as Lee and Tenten both moved on instinct to help him up, Neji’s face wrinkled into a sneer again, stare empty and glassy as it swivelled back to Gaara’s general direction.

“Fine!” Though Neji was eager to bounce back into anger, Tenten was quicker, and her own scorn carved into her pretty features with deadly decision. “Fine,” said Tenten once more, as Neji brushed her hand from his arm, “act like children. Don’t calm down. And definitely don’t try to even fix this problem!” She threw her hands into the air, and Lee winced at the sight of blood on her palms – and winced once again as he saw Gaara’s darting gaze linger, if only for a second, at that very same image. “What do you two even want?” she pleaded. “Neji?”

If Neji was smug, or even just proud to have been the person Tenten turned to first, it didn’t show. He lifted his chin, imperious, and pretended to think about it. “I want Gaara out of here,” he said, after a beat.

“Then I want _you _out of here,” snapped Tenten. “Both of you.” Lee saw, rather than felt, Tenten’s grip close around his fist, and he stumbled to the doorstep as she pushed them both forward. “You settle this outside, and let the rest of us get some gods-damned peace of mind!”  
_“Peace of mind!”_ Her words echoed shrilly off the plaster coating every surface of the stairwell, consonants as hard and brittle as shattered glass, rattling against parking-lot asphalt or a dingy bar floor. Behind them, the door slamming shut was louder than thunder; Lee felt the sound deep in his bones with his every step as he made to switch off the hallway lights, and Neji was just as stiff as he straightened, growing ever so slightly taller out from under their glare.

“You have some nerve,” said Lee, at last. His voice was hoarse, gravelly. But while he’d intended for his words to come out as a heady punch, Neji barely flinched, shrugging them off like a slap.

“Here,” he said, all of a sudden. Lee watched Neji’s shoulders hunch as he began rooting around in the pockets of his jacket, and they shot up to his ears as he stood tall once again. In the shadows, it was hard to see anything other than Neji’s hand, pale and limp as a dead fish – but Lee’s heart sank as he saw the darkness recede at hard right angles.

“Take it,” Neji urged him. His own fingers twitched away from the stake like it was radioactive, but he was allowed that luxury. That fear. Lee shook his head, but Neji thrust his fist toward him. “Take it!” he cried. “You take that stake, and you march us down to the cemetery, and you stab the first _fucking _vamp to pry itself out of its shallow grave.” Lee said nothing, breast heaving, and Neji shook his head. “Ha! You can’t, can you? Fifteen years you’ve been a Slayer and some stranger undoes it all in two weeks. That’s rich, Lee, real rich.”

Lee’s blood had gone from gelid and slow-moving to boiling in a matter of minutes, and he thought he could feel the thin fibres of his blood vessels fraying at delicate seams as he took rattling breath after rattling breath. _Stay cool,_ he told himself – but before he knew it, he lunged for the stake in Neji’s hand, and slammed it blindly into the door beside him, letting it quiver an inch deep into the wood.

“I’m not stupid, Neji,” he said at last. His voice trembled. “I’m _not_.”

“I never said you were! I think you’re _acting _stupid—”

“Well, I’m not doing that either!” Lee roared. This time, Neji did stiffen, and for a moment – the splittest of seconds – fear leapt at the blank planes of his face. Then he schooled his features once more.

“Prove it, then,” he urged him. “Because if your naïveté winds up getting us hurt – if you let Gaara’s bullshit spill out over Tenten, or gods forbid, _Gai_ . . . ”

His voice broke, for a moment, and this time, the cracks were still there when he pressed on: his words may have been as stiff as concrete, but they were the cheap kind, and they eroded quickly under the bristling wind of the question at large. “I’m just so confused, Lee,” he said, at last, “and I’m _scared_. I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared before.”

“Me neither.” Lee felt all of six again, orphaned and alone, and his voice shook like a child’s.

_ Wait a minute._

“Tenten!” Lee hit the door shoulder-first, and the hinges creaked in protest. He ignored them. “Tenten!”

“Made up, have you, boys?” Tenten batted her eyes, but she and Gaara both held clean glasses, and they exchanged a wary glance as Neji followed Lee inside. Lee decided he’d pretend not to notice they’d been eavesdropping – or how they stared at each other once more, wordlessly questioning what they’d managed to miss.

“Tenten,” said Lee, for the third time, “I need the keys to the Jeep.”

“They’re in the hutch.” She frowned. “Why?”

Slowly, Lee looked to Neji for reassurance, feeling his look of understanding wash over him like a cool spring rain. “I’m going to take a road trip,” he said, slowly. The words’ echo was ill-suited to the cluttered apartment: they belonged out in the empty hallway, where the idea lingered like the last of the winter’s frost. That chill had been what had inspired him – the chill of Neji’s glassy calm shattered into pieces, and of his own fiery determination flickering weakly out. They may have been trained professionals, but in the stairwell, Lee and Neji had both still been children, too young and too frail for the biting edges of their monster-hunter world.

But it wasn’t their world that surprised them at every turn, new mysteries and old, forgotten faces winding like snakes through a labyrinth of questions. That intrigue was all Gaara’s – though Lee suspected he might just have stumbled upon the road map he needed to make sense of it all. Of him.

“Not Shukaku,” Gaara said. When his gaze finally settled, he’s locked eyes with Lee. Shadows dragged like black Sharpie across his delicate features as he swallowed, hard. “You’re not going to Suna.”

“I sure am,” said Lee. _It all comes back to children, _he remembered thinking: to childhood homes and forgotten horrors. But he smiled all the same. There was a tiny disco ball keychain on their shared car keys, and it glittered as Lee spun the keyring around on his finger. “That’s where the answers are, Gaara. If Hidan’s back, and our only tie to him is you, well . . . “ He shrugged, but the smile never slipped. “That’s where the answers are,” he said again.

Gaara crossed his arms. “I’m coming with you,” he announced, after a beat. Though his eyes were wide, his tone brokered no questions, and Lee felt his lips twitch ever higher. He raised a palm for Gaara to slap in high-five – but after a few confused blinks, Gaara laced their fingers together, instead. Lee felt a surge of warmth rise in his chest.

“I was hoping you might, you know,” he replied, letting their intertwined hands fall to the countertop. And he meant it. One person riding off into the unknown was a suicide mission – but two people were a feel-good comedy, or an after-school special. Two people were a friendly, socially acceptable weekend in the countryside. A road trip.

Two of them going meant there was a plan.

Dawn had broken by the time the cranky old Jeep had managed to cross town borders, and for once, it was not hidden behind the Northwest’s persistent cloud cover: instead, the half moon was an expectant blank spot in a paint-by-numbers sky, and streaks of purple and blue raced to fill in its lines. The redwood forest scrawled hesitant, cross-hatched shadows across that great sketch of a sky, the early-morning birds tiny splatters of paint. All in all, the dawn was a painting, and Lee was happy to lose himself in the colours.

Beside him, Gaara was grinning softly, head pressed against the shotgun seat window. The closest thing to a car in his day had been a horse-drawn carriage, apparently, and he seemed to think the Jeep the most exciting innovation since sliced bread. _“It’s so fast!” _he’d delightedly cried as they’d croaked past the university, on the town’s southeastern end. They’d been struggling to keep an even eighty (in a fifty lane) and even the tiniest of potholes rattled the car like a gunshot – but apparently, all that had _nothing _on the marvel of the stick shift.

“How did you and your siblings make it all the way out west to Kurama, without a car?” Lee found himself wondering, as Gaara toyed with the seatbelt. “Did you walk? That’s a pretty righteous trek.”

“It was awful long, that’s for sure,” mused Gaara. He winced as the seatbelt snapped against his chest, and worked his hands into his lap again. “But we kept to the woods, for the most part. There was . . . well, there was no onearound to see us.”

Lee nodded slowly, letting his gaze wander back to the freeway. Gaara didn’t elaborate, but Lee knew what he’d meant: there’d been nobody to see the three vampires pushing the limits of their once-human bodies, moving twice as fast as people could, and likely lasting twice as long at those top speeds. He wondered, for a moment, what Neji would find in those blood samples he’d taken – if there really was some tiny blip on some microscope slide that could be to blame for Gaara’s fangs or his aversion to sunlight; if something as mysterious as the Revenant Infectious Pathogen could ever truly be narrowed down, and if the RIP’s biology really was the only fence to surround what it meant to be human.

But then the underbrush shuddered with the shadow of a deer, and Lee swerved, wildly; Gaara clapped his hands over his mouth in a vain attempt to hide his shriek. Fear dissolved quickly into laughter, high voices pinched higher still by adrenaline. When Lee yanked the car back onto the lane once more, his cheeks hurt from smiling.

Neji’s most optimistic estimates had clocked their trip in at twenty-eight hours, and the route they’d drawn onto their map of the United States of Shinobi wove like a stray thread across interstate highways and national parks. The back seat was piled high with pillows, blankets, and changes of clothes – but Lee doubted those seat cushions themselves would see much use. Gaara was hardly going to take over driving, and so Gai had been sure to pack them motel money, and made them both swear up and down they’d stop at least once a day. By Lee’s count, just getting to Suna meant they’d be on the road for the whole work week.

Still, he’d decided he didn’t really mind. Granted, Gaara had an extra set of teeth and venom like a snake tucked away behind his gentle smile, and his gaze sharpened with hunger every time they drove past a stable or a pasture of sheep . . . but then he’d infallibly find something _utterly _fascinating about the roll-up windows or the windshield wipers, and the two of them would be laughing again, as though the world around them depended on it.

_ “You _are_ going soft, aren’t you?”_

Tenten’s voice prickled insistently at the back of his mind as he began turning them toward the interstate, and Lee felt himself stiffen, the hard ridges of his backbone grinding against the stiff car seat. She’d cornered him in Neji’s room as he’d been throwing clothes into a duffel bag, and her gaze had been barbed with something that was cold and burning all at once – like frostbite, or too-strong toothpaste.

_“What’s that supposed to mean?” _Lee had spoken around a mouthful of cotton as he bit down on the arm of an old sweatshirt, arms overflowing with T-shirts he was convinced he would need. Tenten had crossed her arms, her stare never faltering.

_ “It means that the last time you left on a whim to try and _save_ a vampire, he Turned Rin Nohara on the day of her eighth-grade graduation, and you had to stake her in front of her own best friend before she killed and ate him.”_Tenten’s image may have been hazy in the darkness, but his mind, scrambling to fit so many memories together in the world’s worst jigsaw puzzle, remained brighter and clearer than a Kurama day had ever been. Lee might have thought Kiri’s coastal town of Isobu, population twelve thousand – and not a person more, not after Rin’s undeath – might have been the poster town for the Pacific Northwest had he not known the secrets it hid: had he not known the red of the tide wasn’t algae, but blood leaking from the septic pipes, or that the sea roiled with monsters far deadlier than sharks.

_ “That _won’t_ happen again,” _Lee had been quick to insist, and Tenten’s frown had dipped, her expression unreadable.

_“I know,” _she’d said. _“Because you’re going soft.”_

“ . . . Lee?”

Gaara’s forehead had left the faintest of blotches against the window, but there was no redness to his skin to indicate that he’d been leaning too hard. There never would be, Lee realised, after a beat. The thought was an uncomfortable one, and he shook his head hard to clear it.

“Sorry! All good!” Lee felt his eye twitch at his wide smile, and he tried for a wink to offset the motion. Gaara only rolled his lips.

“You’re not ‘all good,’” he stated, bluntly. Lee twisted his tongue into his cheek, determined not to let the smile slip.

“I will be,” he decided. Before Gaara could protest (though the concern etched deep in his face was already beginning to sour) Lee reached for the cassette deck. “What about some music?”

Gai’s road trip mixtape seemed to consist mostly of the Grateful Dead, and Lee feared his finger bones would fracture as he jabbed away at the _“fast forward”_ button. Finally, the stereo blared to life with a familiar guitar’s twang, the brassy sound barely bothered by the weight of the tension-laden air.

“You’ll like this one,” Lee told Gaara. At first, his features were pinched by a confused frown, but by the second chorus, Gaara was singing along, his scratchy tenor as carefree as Lee had ever heard it.

“‘Country roads! Take me home!’” he crowed. They’d edged the windows open as they drifted south into wine country, and Gaara’s fingers fluttered in the tailwind of the early-morning traffic as he flung an arm out skyward. “‘To the place I belong . . . West Konoha! Mountain Mama—’”

“‘Mountain _Gaara_,’” said Lee, cutting him off with a teasing grin. “What? It scans!”  
“I’ll hardly start singing my own name,” Gaara protested. But he matched Lee’s smile with his own, and he let his warbling singing trail off into that warm, familiar laughter as the song drew to a close. “I did like that,” he decided. “Is it a popular song?”

_Country Roads _had dominated easy-listening radio and the soundsystems of cowboy-themed bars for the better part of the last two decades, but the thought tugged a grimace along behind it. Lee shook his head, after a beat. “Among certain crowds, sure,” he said. “But it isn’t really what people our age listen to anymore.” Even Neji thought country was over, and he matched his socks to his neckties.

“Then what do you like?” Gaara seemed genuinely interested, and Lee shook his head.

“You’ll hate it,” he complained. But Gaara’s stare, blue as a cornflower meadow and just as inviting, was insistent. So Lee swallowed back a smirk, and popped the tape from his Walkman. The opening track crackled and popped like breakfast cereal as the stereo struggled back to life.

_ “Spinderella, cut it up one time,” _came Karui Akmichi’s – of Salt-n-Pepa fame – voice. Gaara frowned.

“Is she just going to _talk_ the whole song— oh, _gods_!”

_ Let’s Talk About Sex_ had a catchy chorus and an infectious beat, but Lee doubted revolutionary mixing had anything to do with Gaara’s shock: with the way his eyes bugged out and his jaw went slack, mouth opening and closing over and over like a goldfish’s. It wasn’t until Karui Akimichi demanded to know _“How many guys you know make love?” _that Gaara’s indignant spluttering finally began to relent, whitewater words thinning into the harmless babbling of a creek over stones (or, at least, of someone who probably hadn’t heard the word _“sex” _since his pastor told him it was the Devil’s get).

“That was Salt-n-Pepa,” said Lee unhelpfully. Gaara barely had eyebrows, but Lee could tell he was arching one expectantly; the chalky skin of his forehead had wrinkled in a furrow that carved darker and deeper than the Grand Canyon.

“That was . . . that sure was.” Gaara shook his head, but he was smiling. “Gods almighty! People’d’ve been madder than a henhouse _full_ of wet hens if they’d spoken like that in my day.” Lee was pretty sure that poor Salt-n-Pepa would in fact have been lynched for less, but he shook the thought from his head, trying to focus on the postcard-perfect image of the South he so associated with Gaara’s old-fashioned charm.

“In your day,” Lee decided to tease, “music hadn’t even been invented, had it? It was all, like, ‘Og bang rock on other rock’ – right?”

Gaara’s tone swayed like so many reeds on the edge of his breezy laugh, and Lee straightened with his friend’s smile. “Not quite,” said Gaara, at last. “I’ll be . . . gosh! I’m – er, _we’re_ – one hundred and eighteen this summer.”

“We’ll have to celebrate.”

“Huh?”

Lee scarcely noticed himself say it, but he turned on Gaara with intent. “I’m serious!” he said, deciding he was. “I’m guessing you haven’t had a birthday party in a while.” Gaara had never said as much, but Lee had read between the lines: he could guess that he and his siblings had been in hiding a long, long while (given especially that he’d never heard _Country Roads_).

Emotions flickered across Gaara’s face like film stills, his gaze darting to and fro, and his features twitching as he stumbled to expression. But when he did smile, leaning forward against the dashboard, it was as hesitantly brilliant as the morning sun outside.

“I’d like that,” he said. “Maybe . . . ”

“‘Maybe?’”

“Maybe we could all take a . . . another road trip,” said Gaara, all in a rush. There was no blood beneath his skin, but the rosy morning light made it look like he was blushing anyway, the quick angles of his cheekbones and sharp eyes softened into something organic, nonthreatening. “Your friends, and my siblings.”

Lee knew it was just sunlight glinting off the foil-backed air freshener, as it swung from its perch on the mirror, but he saw Gaara’s eyes glitter in half-baked hope all the same. “A road trip,” he echoed. “Like, one where we’re not reverse-stalking a homicidal vamp all the way to hick country too dry to be _‘backwater?’_”

“Like that, sure.”

“Yeah,” chirped Lee, “that’d be great!” He watched Gaara brighten beside him, and he sat a little lighter, himself, as he moved to skip ahead to the next song. “This one’s wild, too,” he promised, laughing as Gaara buried his head in his hands (and the opening lines to Tenten’s personal anthem, Mei Terumi’s _Bitch_, sounded in harmony to the air conditioner). Maybe, he thought – as Mei proudly announced she was a _“bitch, and a lover”_ – maybe Tenten was right. Maybe he _was_ going soft.

And maybe that was all right. Gai had taught him that there was strength in kindness, and to look for friends in the highest and lowest of places, never lingering by the shadows of obscurity or apathy. Maybe, in the end, he would find _“softness”_ suited the spring, just like thistledown or the silky petals of so many flowers.

Still, Lee’s expression darkened as Gaara turned back toward the window, and the only reflection to meet him in the windshield was that of a Slayer somehow both weathered and green, and smaller than he had any right to be (for all that the push-ups and parallel bar work had added to his chest and shoulders). Lee knew his whole worldview still hinged on those _“maybe”_s – and it was such a thin shield of a word.

They made their first stop that night, at a motel a few miles southeast of the Konoha-Ame border, whose borders seemed at desperate war with the sea of grass lapping at the cheap asphalt of the parking lot. The motel itself reminded Lee of a relic: somehow, even with the chipped paint blurring the contours of the siding and with the roof sagging in stretches, the one-storey wraparound was staunchly permanent; a skeleton of a bygone era daring time to move on without it. Lee supposed it would have to have been. The longest-lasting residents of buildings like these were the mice and roaches in their eaves; the balance of the universe must have demanded some degree of resolution from the walls themselves, to make up for how temporary the people moving through them were.

A flickering neon sign in an open window was the only thing to bid them _“welcome:”_ the motel’s lobby, small and dingy as a broom closet, was empty; the only signs of life Lee could see treading the checkered linoleum floor were a centipede in the corner and a single denim jacket, abandoned beneath the leaves of a plastic plant. The woman standing behind the receptionist’s desk might very well have been an extension of the floor and the sick-green walls, the pulsing glow of her cigarette as static as the headlights of an idling car.

“Evening, miss,” said Lee, hovering awkwardly by the countertop. “We’d . . . ” He looked to Gaara, who’d drawn the collar of his (black, obviously) shirt high over his face, eyes fixed on his scuffed shoes. “We’d like to book a room.”

“_A _room?” The woman came to life at that – her eyes narrowed, and her fingers darted to her thinning lips, so she could grind the cigarette into an overcrowded ashtray. Lee watched himself frown, reflected in her irises.

“One room,” he confirmed. He was careful not to stress the words, but the damage had been done. He felt the woman’s gaze roll like tractor tires over the deep brown of his knuckles, ashen in the dull light, and then to Act Up pins decorating the duffel bag Gaara clutched to his chest. She’d seen what she had to, Lee knew, and he could see judgment burning a hole through her lips, hotter and deadlier than even the cigarette. All he knew to do was smile. “It’s all we have the money for right now,” he said, apologetically. It wasn’t quite a lie – their rations were stretched thin, and most of what the Watcher’s council supplied their Kurama team with went to Gai’s medical expenses or Neji’s lab equipment – but the words dug claws into his tongue all the same, trying desperately to avoid falling from his lips.

“Two beds?” asked the woman, by means of reply. For a moment, Lee wanted to shoot back: to pull a rainbow flag and a Black Panthers banner from somewhere in the depths of their packing, and to give her what for. But his heart was stone, his ribs lead, and he nodded stiffly. Gaara paid in cash.

“What a character,” he whispered, as the two of them meandered down the porch for the single room (with two beds) they’d been awarded. He had long hands, and his pale fingers danced over the room key as he turned it over and over again, sharp features impish with disgust. “Thought maybe Southern hospitality had evolved some since I came back to the real world.”

Lee could only sigh. “Let’s just get some rest,” he resolved. There was nothing more he could think to say – until he felt something cold brush against his pinky. Gaara turned slightly, on his heel, fixing him with a piercing stare.

“We can confront her about it,” he suggested, tone only half-joking. “She was awful rude.”

He said _“rude”_ like it was a cardinal sin – and like he wasn’t, Lee reminded himself dully, an undead hunter. But he let Gaara link their fingers together all the same, and imagined the last of his tension snaking out through his exhale, which fogged ever so slightly in the cool night air.

“And I’m ‘awful’ hungry,” he called, pushing into the tiny room. Gaara didn’t look convinced. “It isn’t worth it,” said Lee, meeting Gaara’s imploring stare. “Seriously, I’ve maxed my bandwidth for today. So . . . does, uh, Domino’s sound good?”

The nearest Domino’s was apparently two freeways over, but there was a takeout menu for a restaurant called Ghlee on Gaara’s bedside table, and he too loudly announced that he’d take the twenty minute walk into town to fetch them curries vindaloo. Lee couldn’t quite figure out how to bid him farewell, so he only waved through their (cracked) window. He tried not to wonder whether Gaara’s fangs would be paying the Republican receptionist a visit, or whether the route to the restaurant passed any abandoned farms.

After a while, Lee flicked the TV set on. An episode of _Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood _was playing – it was the one where it was a beautiful day in the neighbourhood – but Lee didn’t linger. Monday night meant Showtime was running reruns of_ Twin Peaks_, and Lee rushed for its familiarity, sitting a little straighter with every grainy shot of the lumber-mill and every note plodding through the pine forests of F major. It wasn’t that he found comfort, per se, in the premise – though he did enjoy watching a down-to-earth young man and his enigmatic, supernaturally inclined partner solve a drug-related murder case in the Pacific Northwest with almost no leads (and he could hardly help but laugh at the idea of Sasuke the crack dealer stuck in the Black Lodge). No, Lee’s thoughts were far from Kurama: far from his mission. As the theme song droned on, he was fourteen again, back in the condo they’d shared when they lived in Kumo. Though freshman year bore down on them as insistently as the coastal storms, Lee, Tenten, and Neji would sneak out of bed every Sunday night to watch the week’s episode, giggly as they rode the buzz of the new decade and their new high school to the living room and back. Each time, Gai would infallibly discover them, and he’d pretend to be mad his charges were up past bedtime – and then he’d flop down on the sofa behind them, pulling them all close as they scrambled to recap what he’d missed as he slept.

Even as yet another wrenching betrayal loomed on the screen, Lee found himself grinning as the doorknob rattled behind him. “Gaara,” he called, “we’ve got _Twin Peaks_! It’s the one where Coop drinks a ‘damn fine cup of coffee!’”

Any reply that came was muffled, and Lee’s smile slipped quickly as the rattle sounded once more, brass clicking stonily against cheap wood. “Use the key, maybe?” he suggested. “The one I watched you take when you left?”

Still no answer. Lee fumbled for the remote, flicking the TV off. Without it, the only other sound was the dull hum of the motel’s wires, playing in awkward rondo as the doorknob shook and shivered – and while Lee dreaded silence, he lunged for its cover. As quickly as he could, he flew to the hinges of the door, pressing himself to the wall—

_ “Crash!”_

“Agh!”

—but he wasn’t quick enough.

“Couldn’t have opened the door, could you?”

The voice was grumbling and cold, but it wasn’t the first thing Lee noticed. No, that would have been the blood, dappling like watercolour against the geometric carpet of the room, seeping into the doorstep and mingling with the rust. The smell was overpowering: humid and metallic all at once, as rich with iron as an oncoming thunderstorm – had the rain been red and sticky, and the lightning dim porch lights. In a matter of seconds, his motel room had become a slaughterhouse, and Lee felt his own blood roaring in his ears as he tried to keep himself from looking up.

But his instincts had never tended toward self-preservation, and Lee’s gaze darted upward like a fly on a carcass. The shapes came into focus all too quickly: sallow, sausage-like fingers wrapped like chains around something meaty and too-too red._ A heart._

“I wanted to have dinner sitting down,” the voice went on, and the man – the vampire – attached to it might have been smiling. It was hard to tell. Wicked scars were carved into his wrinkled cheeks, and they shuddered and flexed as he spoke around his fangs, curved and bulging as a smilodon’s.“But you wouldn’t even let me in. What if I’d dropped my prize trying to kick your door down, _huh_?”

The stranger lunged, but no sooner had Lee brought his arms up in a block than the vampire begun to laugh. He dangled the heart by the thinnest of fibres in front of Lee’s face, and they both watched fresh blood run in rivulets to the floor.

“The receptionist was mean as all get-out. Put up a fight,” the vampire was musing. Lee wasn’t listening. Memories of his training snaked along the lean lines of his muscles, flaring under new bulk he’d yet to grow into, and he felt his limbs arrange themselves on instinct: he was a coiled spring, ready to fly . . . but once more, Lee was too slow.

“_Oof_!”

The mass driving him into the bedframe was twice his weight, easily, and Lee could just barely register how the man wore his broad frame confidently beneath black ceremonial robes. His green eyes were bloodshot (and his skin, of course, bloodstained).

“My first thought was that you were the blood whore,” hissed the vampire, pinning Lee by the wrists to the mattress below. “But I hear you’re his new pet Slayer. Disappointing, by the way, for my first. Thought your lot was tougher.”

_ We’re plenty tough,_ thought Lee – but it wasn’t the time. For just a moment, he let the film of calm he wore dip into the murk of his fear, feeling the new expression play cat’s cradle with his features as he thought, hard. A wad of cash, green bills rimmed with red, peeked out of the vampire’s pockets, and Lee scrabbled at the lead.

“P-please, sir,” he blubbered. “Please, please leave me out of this. I’ll pay you! I can pay! The Watcher’s council . . . ”

Slowly but surely, Lee felt the grip on his wrists loosen, dead skin slack and clammy against his. “Now, you’re speaking my language,” said the vampire, affectionately patting the bulge at his waist. “So what would you pay, hm? What are you worth?”

“What’s _this_ worth?”

Finally, the spring leapt – finally, Lee pounced. Planting his back as deep as he could into the thin mattress, Lee spiralled his legs up, slamming both feet into the vampire’s chest as he shot forward. He hit the floor in a roll, and was up quicker than a blink. Speed was good, he knew: speed kept you alive against bigger opponents. And if the speed crackled like electricity off his bones and rose in his throat with a mild, over-the-counter hysteria, Lee would take it.

Once more, Lee charged. As the vampire struggled to his feet, Lee checked him by the shoulder and wrapped an arm around his throat, holding just tight enough to keep him still as he drove a scissoring series of kicks to his jaw. The bone there was hollow, and Lee hoped it would break. And then again! As soon as the vampire’s posture pushed past a right angle, Lee was back to needle and nip, darting like a wasp at any weak points he could think of.

But to what end? His holy water and stakes were in the trunk of the Jeep, and even the bedframes were tin – not wood. _“You _are_ going soft, aren’t you?” _Lee couldn’t be sure if Tenten had been right, but he knew one thing: he was unprepared, for the first time in his life.

The second came hot on its heels. Lee had let himself rock back on his feet for just a second too long – and then one of the vampire’s hamlike hands closed around his throat, lifting him up! The gesture was effortless, his movements liquid: Lee had only been a distraction; he’d caused no real damage.

“I’m getting bored, Slayer.”

“_H-hurk_!” It was the best Lee could manage. The vampire’s thumb dug into the pressure point behind his ear, but he couldn’t be sure if the sleeper hold or the slow asphyxiation was what was making those black spots dance in front of his vision; whether he was dizzy or truly weightless as the tips of his toes brushed against the floor.

He’d never know.

“Lee!”

“Gaa— _gah_!”

Gaara’s cry of _“Kakuzu, let him go!” _had barely come before the vampire – Kakuzu – complied. Lee hit the floor like a sack of flour, bones wrenching together underneath bruised skin. But before he knew it, he was lifted again: the dull pain in his core felt like the shadow of some diving falcon, as Kakuzu’s foot came slamming into his stomach . . . and as he was sent flying up, up, up, and as his back connected with the glass of the window.

All Lee could think to do was curl into a ball. It didn’t help. He’d heard of razor winds and acid rain before – but this was a storm of its own. He could feel each incision of the glass into his skin, and the window, already fragile and cracked in places, shattered, crashing down on him in a hurricane of burning pain.

Though his every motion sent another needle ripping into his walking tapestry of injury, Lee couldn’t stay still. He forced himself to roll through the fall – ignoring how he felt the ground below him drive countless glass shards deeper into his side – and he lunged for the windowsill, sliding blood-slicked hands around the old warped wood.

“_Lee_!” Gaara ducked clumsily under one of Kakuzu’s lumbering haymakers, tripping over himself in his haste to reach the window. “Are you all right?” he panted, scrabbling to take one of Lee’s hands in his. “Lee, talk to me, are you all . . . ”

Lee knew time couldn’t stop – that the planet would never stop its kung-fu movie roundhouse kicks around its own axis, lest the inertia send every uprooted object on its surface flying into the nether of space like drops from a dishrag. But he felt the world crawl towards a halt all the same, his tired bones creaking like a braking steam train as he tried to reach out to Gaara. To reality.

He barely cleared the windowsill. Kakuzu was a great mass of shadows in the room behind them both, dark robes and dark hair fanning across their upended furniture like squid’s ink in water, but only for a heartbeat. Then the shadows coalesced, darkening along blocky, Cubist lines as Kakuzu reared back.

_ Stupid! _It was the only thought to escape the frozen flow of time, flickering at Lee’s mind with the intent of a fresh-struck match. To be sure, one of Kakuzu’s pockets had been stuffed with stolen cash. But he hadn’t come to the motel for money; nor had he been aiming to rip out that receptionist’s heart, or to throw Lee through a window. He’d all but said it himself: he was here for Gaara – a fellow vampire.

In his meaty hand was a stake.

_ Stupid! _thought Lee again, hissing through the pain as he swung one leg over the windowsill. As he began to move once more, he felt time rush to meet him, slamming against him like a speeding train. It was enough to give him whiplash – but he suspected the dizziness might have been from blood loss. _Stupid—_

“Ha-a-ah!”

“_Hsh_!”

Lee had all but forgotten how quickly the real world moved, and the dead moved quicker still. All he could see was a streak of black move against a flare of red as Kakuzu brought the stake crashing down into Gaara’s side.

Someone screamed. It might have been him. If his bones had been stiff before, they were Jell-O, now, the dead, leaden weight of his body crashing into itself. Lee’s first instinct was to leap out of the way (though he doubted he could) fearing the eruption of ash that would follow a stake to a vampire’s heart.

But no ash came.

_Stupid, _thought Lee, for a third time; then, as fresh tears began to prickle at his eyes – burning far hotter than the dull ones of his pain – he had to berate himself. _You_ are _going soft._

“Not . . . very . . . bright, are you? Kakuzu?”

Gaara was breathing hard, and each exhale blew slightly less at the fabric of his shirt as it stiffened with thick black blood. Stiffer still, though, was the hard oak line of the stake, jutting angrily from Gaara’s side. He wrapped both hands around it, and screwed his eyes shut. Then he lunged forward.

“See you in hell,” Gaara snarled. Kakuzu was ash in an instant.

“Gods almighty.” Sour bile warred against coppery blood on Lee’s tongue, his mouth alive with some twisted, eighth-grade electrochemistry class; his words buzzed against his teeth with the uncomfortable wattage of that acid-and-pennies battery. “Gaara, you . . . ”

Gaara said nothing, lips pressed thin as he moved to help Lee the rest of the way over the window. His frame was stiff, ready when Lee came tumbling forward – but when Gaara wrapped his arms around him in a tight embrace, Lee could only cry out; the weight drove each of those tiny glass shards even deeper into his skin, and Lee felt as though he’d been set on fire.

“Shit on a cross,” swore Gaara. “Shit, Lee, I’m so— gods almighty!”

His hands flew to his hairline, but they strayed, shortly after, to press at his temples. Lee had barely made it to his own feet when Gaara sank to his knees, hands flying to the floor for support.

It was Lee’s turn to swear, and he hissed the obscenities through gritted teeth as he tried to sit down, too, gingerly arranging his limbs to keep pressure off all that glass. Shadows still danced in front of his eyes, but the great black stain spreading across Gaara’s figure was no woozy hallucination. Lee bit his tongue to keep from cursing again as he watched Gaara’s shirt ride up, pale skin a blinding glare against dark, treacly blood.

“You’re bleeding,” said Lee, dumbly. Around a shuddering breath, Gaara tried to laugh.

“Says you.”

“Uh, yeah, _says I_!” What Lee had intended as a shout came out as a croak, and his hands shook as he pulled a blanket from the nearest bed, wadding it up against Gaara’s wound. “When . . . when’s the last time you fed?”

“I got popadoms at the restaurant—”

“_Gaara_!”

“Fine!” Gaara lurched away from Lee, keeping the makeshift compress in place with a bony elbow as he clutched at his head. “Three days ago,” he said, hoarse. His next wry laugh might very well have been an (un)death rattle, and all Lee could think to do was lay a bloody hand on Gaara’s knee. Between his own blood and Gaara’s cool skin, it was a very clammy experience. “Three days,” Gaara repeated, sinking against the bedframe. Lee shook his head as hard as he could, careful to keep his shoulders from riding up and brushing his neck with glass.

“Come on,” he urged his friend. “Come – ow! – come on. Game face.”

Gaara looked up slowly, horror dawning with frail, wintry lethargy. “No,” he rasped. “No, Lee, absolutely not.”

“You need to keep your strength up.” Lee’s own strength was fading fast, and he shot his free hand out to the bedframe, ignoring how his arm blazed with pain as he tried to steady himself. “You’re no good to anybody like this.”

“I’m _not_ drinking your blood, Lee! I won’t do that to you! I _won’t_!” Gaara shook his head furiously – but Lee was more furious still. He forced himself closer, lifting his hand from Gaara’s knee to thrust his wrist beneath his chin.

“Yes you are, idiot,” he snapped. Gaara’s eyes flashed in warning, and Lee had to fight to meet his stare, his lower lip jutting forward in a stubborn pout. “You are,” he said again. “Come on, Gaara – ow! – please. I need . . . I need us both to see tomorrow.”

All was silent, for a long moment – so long Lee feared he’d blacked out. But then Gaara took Lee’s offered wrist in his hands, bowing his head low.

“I’m sorry, Lee,” he said. “You’ll hate me for this.”

“I m-made—” Lee’s breathing was shallow, but he plastered a smile across his face all the same. “I made you listen to Salt-n-Pepa,” he reminded Gaara, words strained. “Now we’re even.”

There was nothing beautiful about a vampire’s _“game face,”_ but Lee nearly wept with relief at the sight of Gaara’s: with the relief of knowing Gaara would save himself, if for no other reason than the fact that they had work to do.

“Are you really sure, Lee? Really truly?” Gaara lisped around fangs tiered like a wedding cake, and his lips – stained with precious little blood – brushed against the skin of his arms as he spoke. Lee was gritting his teeth to do much else than nod, but it seemed to be enough. He watched Gaara’s gaze soften, as much as it could around those new harsh angles of his— of the RIP’s face.

“Thank you,” he whispered. Lee nodded once more.

“Get— get on with it,” he managed. He squeezed his eyes shut, and felt Gaara’s fangs pierce his skin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: _stares at my drafts of my sakuino PTA mom au, my gaalee NOLA voodoo au, my nejiten bone wars au, my kakagai superhero au, m_  
me: l̨͎͓̖̩̜̦o̮̰͇̜o̮̦̱k̡͍͓̭̙̘̺ ̳̥̟a̴t͖͍̬̳͈͜ ̰̜̗͚a̮̬l͢ĺ̩̥ ̛͕̹̲̩͚͇͇t͈̹̫͓̜h̖̗̮̙͝o̶͓̰̣͉͕̱ͅs̷e̼̱ ̬̯̝͠c̙h̰̤̫͈̠͕̙ị͔̰̣͇͙c̫̰k̨̗̟͖̣ḛ̞̺n̯̘̱s̤̦̖̹̗̼ͅ


	7. Both Hands

The pain was like nothing Lee had ever felt.

Though Gaara had insisted, Lee had begged him not to administer that vampire venom – the neurotoxin that would otherwise have dulled the sting. He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps he still didn’t trust Gaara fully, or perhaps the Slayer in him wanted to take the highest and mightiest of roads. Most likely, Lee just wanted to stay awake.

He swayed, for either the twelfth or twelve-hundredth time, and he made himself shudder against the anchor driven through his wrist. Lee _needed_ to stay awake.

There was a clock on the wall, and its dull ticking seemed cruel to Lee as he shifted against the (now-sticky) carpet beneath them. It wasn’t just the passage of time that mocked him – though Lee did remember, from something a school nurse told him in middle school after a _“bike accident,” _that haemorrhaging was deadly, and that it could occur within ten minutes for an unlucky victim. To be sure, the thought drove a jackhammer to his chest. He cursed it. His weak pulse moved in doubletime to match the ceaseless onslaught of clock’s seconds hand, whose every jerky movement drove a faint headache that much deeper into his skull. Still, even the dull throbbing of his head and the ticking clock were minor concerns, then. They had nothing on the way his body rocked like an abandoned dinghy with each icy wave to shoot through his system, or the droning, relentless sting of Gaara’s bite, boring deep into his skin.

The closest Lee had ever come to the sensation was the time he’d gotten frostbite camping outside Barnes & Noble to pick up the braille copy of some classic for Neji’s sixteenth birthday – but at least that had faded, and been rewarded by birthday cake. All there was now was injury: his blood and Gaara’s, and the fine, gritty layer of ash that coated them both, a thousand microscopic warnings against tetanus and vampire attacks Lee was unable to shrug off. All he could do was grit his teeth – his normal, un-fanged teeth – and try not to blink, letting the stiff air prickle at his eyes and feeling tear-slicked lashes flutter at his browbones. It didn’t make the room any less blurry, but Lee could pretend. He liked pretending.

“Hanging in there?”

When Gaara spoke at last, his voice was hoarse, and his lips brushed against Lee’s skin with each word. They were warmer than they had any right to be, his lips, and Lee shuddered once more, trying in vain to capture some of that heat in the icy slick of his own skin. “Are we . . . are we done?” he croaked. Another warm shock ran up his arm as Gaara’s features began shifting once more, but it dissipated quickly, a cold not-quite-wind rushing to fill the spaces his face had against Lee’s arm. Lee could just hear the crunching of bone over the ringing in his ears.

“_You_ are,” said Gaara, at last. His voice was firmer than Lee had ever heard it, consonants crisp, and the grip he held on Lee’s forearm stiffened with preternatural strength as his feeding fangs retracted at last. A new rush of warmth flooded through his wrist at that – blood, Lee realised, after a beat, pooling in the new divots. Gaara pressed down on the wound with both his thumbs.

If the wall clock was anything to go by, almost a minute passed before Gaara looked up, and another still before Lee could see him. His heart sank when he did. Gaara’s eyes were wide, and too, too blue, shining in what little light there was in the room.

“Are you crying?”

Twin patches of colour had risen on Gaara’s cheeks, and Lee thought the sight would have been jarringly foreign enough without the soft trails of tears winding down their planes. Gaara pursed his lips, redder than usual, and they whitened in thin, bloodless-again lines. “I hate this,” he whispered. The new strength may still have backed his words, but his composure faded fast as he sniffled. “Hate it, hate it, hate it.” A hiccup bubbled up past his frown. “The feeding,” he went on, “the hurting people . . . gods! I’m—” his voice broke, there “—I’m so, so sorry, Lee.”

“None of that.” Lee couldn’t quite manage gentle – really, he couldn’t manage much at all, his tongue thick and heavy as unspun cotton in his burning mouth – but he tried anyway. He’d been clutching at the bedframe with his free hand, but he inched closer to Gaara to lay it on his shoulder. “I offered,” he reminded his friend. Gaara sniffled once more, but he tried to cover it up with a laugh.

“Let me have this,” he pleaded, through a plastic, self-deprecating smile. The second laugh was somehow less convincing than the first – but Lee straightened at the sound of it all the same. The gesture had sent Gaara’s shirt riding up over his stomach, where Lee could just see the stab wound quickly knitting itself back together. (His gaze flickered, for a moment, to his wrist, and to Gaara’s hands, stained scarlet by the pooling blood. He wondered whose platelets and cheery, _Magic School Bus _cartoon cells were healing that stake wound.) But even as his own countless cuts throbbed and stung, Lee met Gaara’s fake smile with a real one of his own. _We’re alive, _he reminded himself, firmly, and he told Gaara as much.

“Here” was all Gaara had to say to that, and wound a corner of the bedsheet tightly around Lee’s wrist. He reminded Lee of a dancer offstage: he had perfect control over his movements, all easy strength and grace, but found himself clumsy all the same, unsure of what to do without a spotlight – or a life-and-death situation. In the end, all he did was stand, and swipe at the tears against his cheeks, leaving great bloody streaks against his skin. With his blue eyes shining and his face a blur of red and white, Lee had to grin. He looked like the star-spangled banner, aggressive Sunan patriotism at the very worst of times.

Though they’d forgotten the stakes and holy water, the first aid kit was at the bottom of their duffel bag. It was technically a makeup bag, and patterned, like most everything Lee and Tenten shared, with happy children’s characters; this time, the colours peeking out from behind the _Tamagotchi_ on the zipper made up the faded shapes of the Muppets. Gonzo beamed up at him as Gaara began rifling through the bag’s contents, and Kermit the Frog’s perpetual anguish had wrinkled along the seams into something somehow somber.

_ Hermit the frog, _mused Lee. _Kermit. Hermit. Permit. Kermit the hermit needs a permit—_

“—Lee!”

Lee’s _“sorry!”_ came out slurred: his tongue was heavy again, and his feet dragged against the sticky carpet as he clambered toward one of the beds. It was with a sigh and another swipe at his rosy (rosy!) cheeks that Gaara made to clumsily help him up. “I took too much blood,” he berated himself, deftly arranging Lee’s long limbs along the mattress. Lee shook his head twice: once for his own benefit, and once more to soothe Gaara’s pensive frown, scrambling for the words buried deep beneath the fog over his mind.

“You took what you needed. And it’s good to see you strong,” Lee murmured. He hadn’t, not for a while – not since the first night they’d met, he was pretty sure, back when they were still trying to kill each other. _How far we’ve come, he thought, _and offered Gaara a weak grin. “You’re more . . . you.”

“You say it like you know me.”

“I do know you.”

Dark spots swam in front of Lee’s vision, and he thought – as clearly as he could, as fatigue rolled over him – of all the fun facts he’d learned about black holes watching _Cosmos _on tape with Gai. Their gravity was so intense they could swallow light itself. And Lee was just woozy enough to feel like he was floating in space; the blurs of red and pink and blue as Gaara shook his head might have been so many nebulae, the shattered glass on the floor and against the dark surface of his skin myriad stars in awkward constellations. But he knew all the same that black holes were the centre of nearly every galaxy, and Lee felt their pull on his arms and his legs as he struggled to remain still on the bed.

“Stay with me, now, Lee,” said Gaara. He set a tentative hand – still so strangely warm – on Lee’s chest, fingers twitching between the sharp edges of twin glass shards. “Your pulse is real weak,” he added, frowning. “I can hardly feel it.” His eyes were wide with concern.

Lee pulled himself to his (skinned) elbows with a groan, but his breath was softer and steadier than it had been all night as he twined his fingers through Gaara’s. “Nah,” he yawned, “’s’all good.” Gingerly, he moved Gaara’s palm from his breastbone to the right side of his chest, where his heart still pounded out that frantic foxtrot. “Dextrocardia,” he sounded out carefully, speaking headily around the tired fog. When he’d first been diagnosed with the condition – when he’d been shot through the chest by a vampire’s lackey, back on his Kiri suicide mission, and walked away alive – he’d learned that structural differences in the heart’s chambers could cause dextrocardia patients to develop heart murmurs: uneven heartbeats. Perhaps that was why his pulse skittered and jumped under Gaara’s touch, and why its frantic dance ground to an adagio as Gaara’s face came to life with a faint, gentle smile.

“The more you know.” Gaara nodded to himself, before turning back to the first-aid kit, fingers lingering on the print of Dr. Teeth and his Electric Mayhem. “Take off your shirt,” he instructed Lee.

Lee was, for better or worse, still frail, muscles clinging as precariously as dewdrops to his tired frame. Perhaps that was why he felt a flush struggle to his face at the order, and why his lips quirked in a smile he wasn’t quite used to wearing. Perhaps it was why, as he shivered under the foreign chill across his bare skin, he leaned into Gaara’s featherlight touch. Perhaps Gaara was tired, too, still adjusting to the new blood in his system – and perhaps that was why his gaze fell so soundly on Lee’s chest, and sharpened with something not quite hungry along details Lee could only see as rich brown skin and old silver scars, and sore muscles blocked out in shadows and fitness regimens (he’d been doing a lot of pecs lately; perhaps it had been paying off). _Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps._ It was as fragile and insubstantial a word as _“maybe,”_ but warmer, somehow. A welcomer weakness.

Gaara moved clumsily, at first, and Lee was reminded of a sparrow, pecking awkwardly at the ground, as Gaara carefully drew the shards from the wounds on his chest and shoulders. But by the time had come for Lee to flip over onto his stomach, Gaara had found his rhythm, and Lee heard him humming softly as he worked. His voice was too faint for Lee to recognise the melody, but it didn’t matter: his voice seemed to sway as easily in the night breeze as the grass outside, warm and dry as the countryside itself. The thought brought a lazy smile to Lee’s face, and he turned it on Gaara as he leaned back against the pillows once more.

“Thank you,” he said, earnestly. Too earnestly. For a moment, Gaara’s wide eyes and parted lips were a warning, but his gaze softened as his hand brushed against Lee’s.

“Thank _you_,” he replied. His straggling curls had fallen over his forehead, and he ducked halfheartedly behind a swoop of them. “I like these bandages,” he offered, poking lightly at one across Lee’s clavicle. This was a sentiment he’d already expressed – band-aids being another miraculous modern invention – but Lee brightened all the same.

“Cute, aren’t they?” His chest was littered with rainbows and starbursts, as brightly coloured as the fields of wildflowers they’d spent the day driving past, or so many neon signs at a roller rink. Gaara nodded enthusiastically.

“Are the rainbows for gay pride?”

Lee was pretty sure the rainbows were for _Reading Rainbow_, which Tenten (much to Lee’s envy) had appeared on an episode of when she was seven. But there was a twinkle to Gaara’s eye, so Lee grinned. “They can be,” he decided.

“Swell.” Gaara sat just a little taller as he zipped the first-aid kit shut. “Swell,” he said, once more. It was the last thing Lee heard before he fell asleep, Gaara’s long fingers tracing slow circles around the new punctures in his wrist.

He didn’t sleep long, and as he came to, he was met by two things: the wreckage of the room, bloodstains dark and crusty in the daybreak, and the stark reminder dwelling in their shadows – that thanks to the vampire Kakuzu, the motel was now a crime scene.

“You didn’t sleep, did you?”

Lee felt like he weighed a thousand pounds as he turned stiffly on the narrow bed, his skin dry and tough as a burlap sack, straining against the pokey edges of firewood bones. Gaara was just as rigid, and he crossed the carpet, whose geometric patterns had stained darkened in chessboard splotches, as slowly and deliberately as a pawn on its two-square, opening-turn jaunt. “How can you tell?” he wanted to know. There were any number of reasons Lee could have offered – the fact that he’d clearly showered, or that the shower they were to share was in chaotic disarray, clearly the loser in the fight between semi-modern plumbing and a vampire who couldn’t quite figure out how it worked. But Lee only gestured down, to the blanket he knew he hadn’t been curled up under when he’d first dozed off.

“I thought you might be cold,” said Gaara, after a beat. Lee shook his head. He had been cold – he still was, really, and his head swam as he sat up – but this wasn’t one of the scratchy, mock-wool throws from the motel room’s closet. The old quilt was older than he was, made for Gai by his mother when he’d been a child, and he’d passed it on to Lee hated going on even the shortest of overnight trips without it. He’d stashed it in the very back of the Jeep, and wondered, absentmindedly, if and how Gaara had known to take it.

By the time that wall clock hit half past four in the morning, they’d packed what they could (Lee’s shirt, torn and bloody, was deemed _“unsalvageable”_ by Gaara, and _“kinda narsty” _by Lee himself) and hit the road once more, exiting through the broken window.

The dawn was not so bright that Gaara needed more than a long-sleeved fleece to protect himself from the sun, and the two of them chattered animatedly as they pulled up beside a roadside restaurant for breakfast. The handpainted sign proclaimed they had the best soul food in all of Ame State, its blacks, reds, and greens faded against the gold of the grass and the lavender sky. Gaara proclaimed he was just happy they were open. But Lee, for his part, found himself standing tall and straight as they pushed through the creaky old door, and as a silver bell above them tolled their welcome. An elderly Black man stood behind the counter, and he smiled, and called Lee _“son.”_ He seemed to be hewn from tourmaline and onyx, the restaurant a hundred shades of quartz behind him: they were all staunchly permanent, immovable. Lee felt safer under the echo of his booming laugh than he had in a long time.

“So, where’re you two boys travelling in from?” he wanted to know, once he’d set a heaping plate of chicken and waffles between them. Gaara stiffened in his booth seat.

“How’d you know we were travelling?” he demanded. The man blinked slowly.

“I just assumed. Given your bags and all.” His eyebrows knit in a fuzzy line across his forehead, and what little hair he had left was grey and wispy as a dust bunny. Lee shot Gaara a warning look: this man wasn’t their enemy.

“Sorry, sir,” said Lee, placing his hand over Gaara’s when all he did was scowl into his breakfast. “It’s been a rough night.”

The man’s warm smile was back in an instant, and the tension over their table melted like the butter on Lee’s waffle. “Don’t you worry, son,” he said. “Mornings aren’t for everyone.”

Gaara’s face had gone ashen in the pale sunlight struggling over the horizon, and Lee patted his hand awkwardly as he slumped further down into his sweater.

“I suppose not,” he resolved. It was Gaara’s turn to silence him, though, something icy and determined glinting at his eyes. Lee bade the man a hasty farewell (and quickly switched seats with Gaara, so he’d be out of the sunshine). Gaara’s only acknowledgment to the gesture – either of them – was a weak nod.

“Sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. “But we do have a lot to talk about.” _Now that neither of us are bleeding to death. _Lee tacked the last part on himself, but it seemed pertinent, and to have some traction in Gaara’s steely gaze. Still, all Gaara offered, after a beat, was another limp nod. “Uh, so,” he wanted to know, “how’s your wrist?”

Unlike the cuts he’d suffered going through the window, a few brightly coloured band-aids and a half night’s sleep had done little to soothe the pain or heal the great jagged holes driven through the ulnar artery of his left arm. But Lee, smiling around a mouthful of waffle, decided he had better things to do than gripe – or, at least, better things to gripe over. “I never thought I’d hear a vampire ask that,” he told Gaara, knowingly. “Or see one stake one of their own kind.” _Or save my life. _But Tenten’s voice, grumbling at the back of his mind, was quick to stop him from saying so. So Lee just arched his eyebrows. “Gaara,” he said, as gently as he could, “I’ve never wanted to impose – well, there was that one time I showed up to your house because I was trying to spy on you, and you figured out I was human. But other than that, I think I’ve given you a lot of space!”

Lee scarcely heard himself say it: Tenten’s rapid-fire accusations and quips had taken hold of his throat, and he felt the restaurant around him sharpen into a mishmash of threats and escape routes, the way she saw the world. The way they were both _trained _to see the world. It was with Neji’s cool appraisal Lee listened to the catches in Gaara’s shallow breathing, and watched him squirm in his seat, leaning his back against the window as though to hide in the backlight. He made a sharp silhouette: sharp and dangerous.

“You have,” Gaara relented, at last. “You’ve been . . . you’ve been real kind.”

_We’ve established that. _Lee’s stomach churned, his breakfast, once so comforting, was a hard lump in his throat. “Of course I have. I care about you,” he told Gaara, firmly. “But this is life and death. Always has been.”

It was Gaara’s turn to reach across the table, fingers grazing Lee’s wrist, where a heavy cotton compress just peeked out from the hem of his sweater. “I wish it wasn’t,” he whispered. “I wish it was just . . . ” He shook his head, and the clean lines of his silhouette shattered: he was live in living colour again, and his smile is cheerless, narrowed eyes betraying the gesture. “The night we met,” he began, “you tried to stake me. It didn’t work.”

_ To say the least. _Once again, Lee’s stare roamed across the table to Gaara’s side. He held himself about as gingerly as usual – if Lee hadn’t known better, he’d never have guessed Gaara had been viciously stabbed the night before.

“As, ah, as I reckon you know, the Turning strips a body of its soul.” _Chakra, _Lee wanted to correct him – it was the more scientifically accurate term – but he was silent, letting Gaara find his own rhythm, restless hands toying with Lee’s bandages as he struggled to match the steady metronome of his all-too-apparent pulse. (Lee realised, with a start, he’d never known a vampire to have a pulse before. It must have been thanks to the human blood – _his_ blood.) (The thought was disconcerting.)

“ . . . organic material,” Gaara was going on, in a lecture Lee had suffered through a thousand times. “The Turning makes our systems reject the soul that lingers in things like wood, or bone. Or garlic,” he added, as an afterthought. “Garlic has more soul than any other plant, did you know that?”

“The point, Gaara,” Lee chided him. Gaara rolled his lips, and Lee watched his frown disappear under eggshell-white patches until he found his next words. When he did speak, it was all in a rush, voice whispery-tight with secrecy.

“Some of us still have souls.”

“_What_?”

All of a sudden, time had no meaning: Lee couldn’t tell if his own (reliable) pulse had stopped for a second or for fifty, and whether the breath he’d been holding ever would tumble from his lips. With the pleather cold against his back and the floor just too far down for his feet to rest flatly, Lee felt as though he’d never quite sat in his own skin before – the shock had pulled the little boy inside him to new pin corners, batting him like a pinball against the hard edges of reality. It shouldn’t have been surprising, Lee wanted to tell himself. Hadn’t he suspected? Hadn’t he thought Gaara so very human? All the same, it was a sledgehammer of a confession, and their relationship was as unsteady as a house of cards.

“How is that possible?” he asked at last, voice hoarse. Across from him, Gaara seemed as tall and unyielding as a gravestone.

“My . . . our father always said we were cursed,” he said slowly. “Well, our father said a lot of things, and not all of it was true. But cursed or not, we always were different from the other kids in the village: we were stronger, faster, healthier. It ought to have been a blessing – but our father said it was because we were the Devil’s get.

“I suppose a lot of this starts with our dear old Pops,” Gaara went on, lowering his chin. “He was a preacher – a real fire-and-brimstone type, even before he lost our ma.”

“What happened to her?”

“Vampires happened,” said Gaara, flatly. “She was bit when she was pregnant with my siblings and I, and by the time she began to Turn, she decided couldn’t take it.”

Realisation came in like the tide: slowly and imperceptibly; Lee could hardly feel it until he seemed to be drowning in it. “She killed herself?” he asked. He felt like his bones were made of rebar, and his voice seemed just as heavy and unwieldy as he tried to find the words. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, at last. Gaara’s face was impassive. Cold.

“It was a hundred years ago, Lee,” he muttered. “And we never knew her.” The tail end of the excuse came too loudly, and the half-moon shadows beneath Gaara’s shining eyes softened as his face began to flush. When he let go of Lee’s hand to turn back to his plate, he stabbed a piece of chicken with such intent the china beneath it cracked. “Anyhow,” he bit out, “The years passed, and our father raised us alone, and kept us away from the other villagers, the other children. We were schooled at home – well, Kankuro and I were, and our meemaw taught Temari how to sew and cook. Pops didn’t think women were supposed to learn how to read.” This, he added bitterly, and Lee felt his own skin prickle at the notion. “He thought, for the most part, that enough prayer and the odd whipping would beat the Devil from us. But we were always strong – physically, at least. And then, when we were about ten, eleven, everything began to change.

“A new man had come to Shukaku – a war veteran, he said he was, some Manifest Destiny type. He could have said he was the President himself, and we’d’ve believed him. He had a way with words. And spiritual, too, which you need to be that far South. He began showing up to our father’s congregation, every Sunday. He joined the choir – couldn’t sing worth a damn, but he kept the singers in foreign tea and good silks. And before we knew it, the people of Shukaku were no longer singing the praises of the Twin Lords, but of the Devil’s third son: Jashin.”

“Deidara Yamanaka’s amulet,” Lee recalled. “It was for Jashin, wasn’t it?”

“You remembered?” For a moment, the bitter haze over Gaara’s features lifted, and Lee was reminded of wildflowers peeking through a patch of brambles. But most wildflowers, he knew, were toxic; Gaara’s gaze darkened quickly enough as memory clouded it once more.

“Well, our Pops had never been the loving, doting kind, but . . . as he turned to this new god, things got bad,” he whispered. “At home.”

“Oh, Gaara.” They’d been dancing around a delicate tug-of-war since they’d sat down, and it was Lee’s turn to take Gaara’s hand, holding it in both of his. Gaara edged forward in his seat, as though he were leaning into the touch.

“We decided when we were thirteen that we were going to run away,” he explained. “But we had no idea where we would go. Shukaku might have been a town of a thousand people, but it was our whole world. Forget finding our way to the coasts, or the big cities – we’d scarcely understood the idea of a state capital. Or the ocean. Kankuro used to think _that _was made-up.

“I don’t know how the man found us, or why he decided to take us in. Maybe he was our guardian angel, we liked to say. At the very least,” added Gaara as an afterthought, “we thought he was a man of the gods – never mind who _his_ violent, bloodthirsty god was. But he was strict, too. We had to remain hidden from the outside world, and listen only to him. In return, he taught us to hunt – to shoot, to fight, to kill – and he insisted one day, the skills would be vital for our lives together.”

“‘Together?’”echoed Lee. “Why was he so insistent you stay . . . oh.”

“Three guesses,” drolled Gaara, “as to what his name was.”

“Definitely _not _Tobirama Senju,” Lee muttered, turning Gaara’s palm over in his. “Fucking Hidan.”

“Fucking Hidan,” Gaara agreed, before pressing on. “Every day with him – with Hidan – was the same, until day we turned twenty-one. By that point, the three of us were restless. Times were changing. The World’s Fair had come and gone, there were lightbulbs and telephones and new kinds of music – and we’d spent almost ten years at that point in the lab Hidan built under his house, never let outside. Then, when twenty-one came knocking on our bolted door, Hidan drew us outside – and he walked us to our old house.

“Our father was frail, then: thin as a scarecrow and as hollow as the straw inside. Hidan told us it was consumption – but it wasn’t consumption that’d left those twin, gaping wounds on the old man’s neck. Still, there he was . . . and while we were shocked to high heaven to see his old mug, he wasn’t a lick surprised to see _us_. Apparently, Hidan had told him as soon as we’d come to him. They’d agreed that he was the best man to take care of us, _‘cursed’_ as we were. And . . . and then they led us out back, to our mother’s grave.

“He explained to us then it had all been part of his plan. He’d been the one to bite our mother, and he didn’t much care whether she survived the Turning. The important part, to him, was us, still inside her. He called it the Rite of the Bijuu: some old, cult-of-Jashin bull. If the mother has Jashin’s blessing – that’s vampirism, the Revenant Pathogen, or whatever y’all call it – inside her, the babes are born with it. The soul, the chakra, they’re strengthened in the child, to the point of excess. And if the children are Turned, they still lose soul – but not so much to become monsters.” _Not so much that they stop feeling, _he seemed to say, and Lee thought, dimly, to Gaara’s tears and compassion during the night – and of Sasuke Uchiha, a vampire in love. “Of course, to Hidan, all that mattered was that we were immune to the stake.”  
“So he bit you.”

“He shot our father through the empty heart. Then he bit us.” With another watery smile, Gaara reached his free hand across the table, extending his thumb in a _“finger gun.”_ “Bang bang,” he said. There was no mirth to his laugh.

Lee looked numbly down at their intertwined fingers. Gaara held on to him tightly, fiercely: his fingertips bore hard enough into Lee’s to bruise, and what little blood there was beneath his skin faded against his white-knuckled grip. His last words came all in a rush, his breathing shaky, and impossibly quick; it was as though he were trying to cram the sentences into one, and they jostled against one another like the boxcars of a freight train. “We Turned quicker than most vamps,” he explained. “The disease had been killing us since before we’d been born, after all. I think Hidan had known. Within the month of our father’s death, it was time for our own. Then he took us upstate to meet his siblings-in-arms: a woman named Konan, and a man named Nagato. They said vampires were the chosen species of Jashin, and that we were the first of an army in their Lord’s name – an army set to Turn every human with _our _blood, our cursed, can’t-stake-us blood, and reform the world in Jashin’s image.”

“So what did you do?”

“What was there _to_ do?” Gaara tugged his hands away to spread his fingers, his frown hapless. “We ran. We spent a century in hiding, with nothing but the clothes in our travelling bags, with nobody but each other. It was by chance we heard the Akatsuki was moving on Konoha: there were some other vamps hunting near our hideout on Uzushio land, and they brought up Sasuke Uchiha. We knew we had to investigate . . . ”

“And you found Naruto Uzumaki, another Uzushio _rez_-ident, at a Kurama nightclub, and the rest was history.” Lee hadn’t been so dizzy since his second concussion, when he’d fallen from a Rybalko on the high bar, clipping his head against the sole spot of the floor that wasn’t covered by mats. This time, though, the coppery tang filling his mouth wasn’t from a nosebleed, but from biting his cheek – and his wrist didn’t ache because of a sprain, but because of the great fang marks scarring it. He was out on the tarmac before he knew it, pacing wildly back and forth.

“Lee! Lee, come back!”

Gaara couldn’t make it past the doorstep – his arms were up in front of his head, shielding his skin from the sun – but even twenty paces back, Lee could see his blue eyes were blazing.

“You wanted to know,” he wailed. “Now you do! You know it all!”

  
“I don’t know shit!” cried Lee – whether it was a comeback or a general statement, Lee couldn’t be sure; all he knew was that he needed to bite at something, to keep his head from spinning so frantically. There was a part of him that thought he should have been thrilled: thrilled to know that Gaara and his siblings were an exception to the unspoken rule. That _he_ wasn’t going soft, they were. That vampires were still the bad guys – that the world could still be drawn up in those neat, comic-book lines, the constant fight for his survival boxed neatly into _Superman_-style panels, forbidden by publishers’ regulations from dabbling in blood or death or stakes higher than jail time.

But there was no relief rushing to meet his whirling thoughts, and his body, blood-drained and empty, felt as reedy as the thickets brushing at his waist. He’d known from the start they were slated to be roped into something big: that this was no ordinary Slayers’ undertaking. But that knowledge was a far cry from preparation. The conspiracy unravelling before him stretched as endlessly as the freeway did, and stood older than the ground beneath him.

It was to that ground Lee sank at last, letting the grasses, and their muted blur of yellows and greens, swallow up the steely blue of the sky. Their colours were deceptively soft: Lee’s skin, already tattered, came to life along a thousand scratches as he brushed against brambles and prickles. As he let the sun disappear behind that barbed golden wall, he decided he didn’t care. The dirt beneath him didn’t care about _anything_, after all, and it was doing a lot better than he was.

“_Lee_.”

Lee answered without thinking, gaze fixed dully on the tapestries of flora around him. “Go back inside,” he snapped, “or at least to the Jeep. You’ll get sunsick, and burn up, and die, again.”

“No, I won’t.”

Gaara’s protest was petulant, but his expression was wrinkled with genuine concern as he knelt down in the grass beside Lee. The blood he’d given must have gone a long way, Lee figured, because Gaara’s image was striking and vibrant: his eyes were bluer and brighter than the sky would be all springtime, and that faint rosy tinge to his cheeks was made all the stronger by the gold of the reeds.

“It’s life and death, remember?” he asked, softly. Lee hugged his knees to his chest, and let his eyes slide shut as his vision swam with the mottled bluesof his jeans.

“And you wished it wasn’t, _remember_?” he shot back. He could just register the shadows dancing behind his closed eyelids, and he felt something not-quite-warm brush against his arm, a new weight brushing against his shoulder. Gaara’s fingers scraped loudly against the dry soil as he lay his arm behind Lee’s waist: a silent plea for permission. Lee leaned back in wordless assent, and let Gaara lay his head on his shoulder.

“I sure do,” he said, softly. “I wish that the both of us were . . . were normal humans, and that this was just any old trip to Suna, and that we knew what was waiting for us when we got back to Kurama.”

“We’d still be an ‘us,’ then?” Lee asked. “If we were ‘normal?’”

Gaara shrugged, and Lee felt his shoulders brush up and down against his own. “I’d like us to be.”

Slowly, Lee stretched his legs out, ignoring the grasses he flattened as he lay all the way back against the soil. The morning sun was still strong enough to cut across his vision, and its light blurred into countless rainbow colours as he blinked the glare away: familiar blues and reds, angry oranges, Manic Panic pinks. And then white: blinding, brilliant white.

“Sakura Haruno,” he announced, in a voice not quite his own. Gaara stiffened beside him, his shoulders inching toward his ears as he settled back on his elbows.

“What about her?”

“She’s strong,” said Lee, simply. “Like, super strong. And she’s never sick, and when we first met her, Neji said that was because she had loads of chakra, like, in her blood. We’d been testing to see if she was a werewolf, but . . . ”

“Excess soul,” Gaara marvelled, guiding the blocky puzzle pieces together. “As I live and breathe – Lee, you’re brilliant! That’s it! That’s what the Akatsuki is after.”

“But how did they know?” demanded Lee. “How did they know she has all this soul – that she’d be suited for this Bijuu Rite bull? And—” he bolted upright “—what about Sasuke? He loved, Gaara, and he put himself at risk for that. He had a _soul_.”

Gaara was pale and drawn as he nodded. “But unlike Sakura, he was fully aware,” he supplied. “And gay.”

“Jashin doesn’t like that, huh?”

“There wouldn’t be enough soul in the world to redeem _him_ to the Akatsuki,” muttered Gaara. Lee rolled his lips, before extending a hand to Gaara.

“Come on,” he urged him, shaking the thought aside. “We’ve got to call the others, and tell them that we’ve figured it out. And then we have to get back to Kurama – or should we still go to Shukaku, tracking Hidan’s lot? Or—”

“Lee, please.” The words came in a long, tumbling sigh, and Gaara let the exhale guide him all the way back down to the ground, deflating along its echo. “Can’t we just stay here for a bit? Digest breakfast? Rest?”

Thirty miles north and twenty west lay their roadside motel, and Lee wondered if the cops were there yet, crawling over the scene. They might have found Lee’s bloody shirt, or the receptionist’s torn-out heart, and they might have been wondering how many bodies to look for. They might have been swabbing the bloodstains from the carpet or the jagged window, and searching in vain through government databases for the DNA matches. The blue of the sky might have been dimmed as it stretched away from warring, flashing lights, the birdcalls shrill in response to sirens.

Or they might still have been in bed, as the sun dragged itself up and onto its six-AM perch, as wearily and uneasily as a gymnast to the balance beam. And so Lee sighed, too, and lay back next to Gaara. “Yeah, I suppose,” he agreed, at last. “We can rest here, for a while.”

“Good,” said Gaara. His smile was wan behind the haze of the grass. “You need it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sasuke uchiha voice: ¿ q u i e r e s ? 
> 
> _thank you all so much for 300+ hits – and in general for the lovely comments and the _bright side_ posts some of you will tag me in or send to me on tungle! i love you all so much! especially my wife and also our/rock lee's theme song_


	8. As I Lay Me Down

“Well, yee-_freakin_’-haw.”

“Tenten!”

The floors of the Sunagakure bus terminal roiled like an ocean storm, so many arrivals and departures slamming against one another like riptides, faces and whitened knuckles rushes of whitewater. But Lee was a storm of his own as he sprinted across the tile, a whirlwind as he scooped Tenten into an embrace. “Oh,” he cried, spinning her around, “it’s been too long!”

Neji’s glare could have cut glass, his scowl darker than the city night would ever have been. “It’s been, like, three days,” he pointed out. Still, Lee saw a twinkle to his friend’s eye as Neji lifted his gaze once more, allowing himself to be folded into a bone-crushing group hug. “You two are the worst,” he sighed, shaking his head as he pulled away. “The _worst_, you know that? It’s embarrassing to be associated with you.”

Tenten’s hands strayed to her hairline – and to the brim of the cowboy hat she’d clearly donned specifically for the trip. They’d agreed to rendezvous in Suna’s state capital before making the last stretch of the journey to Shukaku together. Lee wasn’t quite sure what he hoped they might find there – whether answers would come in the form of some murderous, cultish shrine or an army of religious super-vampires, if they were to be found at all. But if nothing else, there was one thing he knew that he, at least, had in mind: Gaara’s childhood home. It felt wrong not to see it for himself, after all they’d been through together, and Lee hoped he might help his friend find closure.

So his smile, though thin at the corners, where it warred against the fear gripping his throat, was a real one. “You love us, Neji,” Lee chided him, as Tenten slung an arm around either of them. Neji rolled his eyes, pressing his head into the crook of Tenten’s neck.

“All I _love_ is the fresh air,” he groused. “We’ve been on a train for the past day and a half –which, by the way, I sure wouldn’t have put up with if I didn’t trust you, Lee.” Lee felt a frown catch against his grin, and he swallowed it down, hard, as Neji went on to needlessly clarify. “We _aren’t_ here for the vamp.”

“Speaking of,” said Tenten, “where _is_ the man of the hour?”

Her tone gave Lee pause. Her smile came as a cheap knockoff of his own, and her voice was tight, words carefully weeded from a crop of insults Lee knew to be resting on her tongue, as it twisted into her cheek. He and Gaara had crammed themselves into the first phone booth they could find along the freeway to explain the story to Tenten and Neji, but their shrill voices and evasive questions had come across the phone line as so many warning bells: Lee knew they thought it all too good to be true. When Lee had called Gai from their second motel that night, his fears had only been confirmed. He’d learned Neji had locked himself in his lab, running test after chakra-probing test on Gaara’s blood, as though the truth were hiding behind a platelet, and that Tenten had been shocked into actually finishing her math homework. And so Lee felt his skin pebble against a chill foreign to the South as he led his friends across the floor, flagging Gaara down with a wave that might very well have been a spasm.

Gaara looked no less nervous himself, but he worked up a smile of his own as he approached their group, and he came to hover by Lee’s side. “Howdy,” he hazarded. He deflated visibly when Neji laughed, and Lee gave him an encouraging nod. “I was just picking up coffee,” he went on, offering the tray he held to the group. Tenten arched an eyebrow.

“You know our coffee orders?” she asked, tapping a glittery nail against the scrawled _“Decaf”_ on one of the cups. Gaara shrugged.

“Lee told me,” he said lightly, as though that explained it all. When Tenten’s expectant stare swivelled toward him, Lee found himself incredibly interested in the _“Caution: contents hot”_ warning on the lid of his mocha.

A stiff wind had been hunting them all along the interstate, but its spastic, dissonant cries were lifted into a cheery major key as the breeze whistled down the city streets. All of Sunagakure seemed musical to Lee, then, cooped up in the back seat of the Jeep: the skyline was bar after bar of sheet music, its buildings so many clean-drawn crescendos, and the rumbling of cars even older than theirs pounded against the asphalt like a bassline. Most musical of all, though, was the way their laughter mingled and split apart in so many harmonies, ringing off the windshield. Lee knew his friends had their doubts about Gaara, but with Starbucks buzzing through their systems and the post-travel high blasting from the car radio alongside Public Enemy, those faded with the stars into the city night. All that mattered was the freedom of their night off, and he knew to make it count.

“Tenten, over there!” Lee had swivelled to stretch his legs across Gaara’s lap – Gaara said he liked the warmth – and he felt his shoes jam against the car door as he leaned forward to tap on Tenten’s shoulder. The seatbelt threatened to snap against his chest, but Lee didn’t care. “That’s the place, isn’t it?”

The reflection of Tenten’s grin in the rearview mirror was wolfish, and Lee knew the sparkle to her eyes wasn’t just the city lights bouncing off the glass. When they’d first piled into the Jeep (and Lee had ceded the driver’s seat to its rightful heir) Tenten had proudly announced she had no intentions of leaving Suna state borders without a little _“cowboy action.” _The Stetson perched proudly on her head had just been the start: she’d been dragging them blindly up and down the state capital’s streets in search of the honky-tonk bar she’d learned from a travel agent was the best in the South. (When Neji had protested that _every _bar this far South was, by virtue, a honky-tonk bar, Lee figured it was for his own sake that Tenten ignored the comment.)

The bar in question was named the Continental Club, and from what Lee could tell, Tenten’s high hopes had struck paydirt. A flickering neon sign above the red double doors was bold as it rubbed elbows with the moon, the bar a proud haven for the sleepless, even behind dark walls. Midnight crouched on the horizon like a hungry, patient animal, but with the night air alive with the dancing echoes of laughter and the faraway smell of a deep-fryer, Lee didn’t think it would be pouncing any time soon. Indeed, the sign above the doorway shone like the sun, so bright Neji had to hide behind his sunglasses, and Gaara’s gaze hit the ground. Lee nudged him in the side.

“Chin up,” he chided him. “Isn’t this just like home for you?”

“Oh, go boil your shirt!” Gaara had been a few steps ahead of him, and when he came, shocked, to a halt, his hip clipped against Lee’s. Under the red glow of the bar sign, what little blood he had left bloomed in great flushed roses below Gaara’s cheeks. “I ain’t some soft-soldered, sexed-up secesh,” he sighed at last, shaking his head. “I have _some_ pride. And I have never been in a place like _this_, I promise you. Just look at the crowd!” Lee followed his pointing finger to the storm of people clouding around the bouncers at the doors, the threat of the workday riding the dawn’s coattails a distant one. Gaara’s eyes were wide and hapless as he pressed on. “My father would have called this a sinner’s den,” he said, softly. Lee gave him a closemouthed smile, linking their pinkies.

“Well, your father isn’t here. _I_ am.” His tone was as flat and stubborn as the concrete they stood on, which Lee supposed might have been why Gaara steadied, slightly, at the comment. It was enough to push his tiny grin into something lopsided and real; Lee felt himself all but beaming when Gaara returned the gesture. “Let’s have some fun for once,” he urged him. “What is there to lose?”

“You must think you’re _something_, Lee,” teased Gaara, “if you think I’ll go off all ‘how came you so’ just because you bat your lashes and give me that smile of yours.”

Lee swung their hands back and forth between them, gently tugging Gaara along. “Well, won’t you?” he wanted to know. As they meandered under the awning, there was no more neon he could have blamed Gaara’s slight flush on, and his eyes glinted like glaciers in the dappled shadows of the crowd.

“I need a drink,” he laughed. Lee decided it was a victory: _that_, if nothing else, had certainly urged Gaara into the bar.

Sure enough, Gaara was swaying to the live (country) music as they wound through the crowd of the bar, his carriage soft and loose as thistledown as he draped it from the prickles of his earlier anxiety. Lee had thought it before, and knew he’d think it again: it was good to see Gaara at ease, his springtime smile an easy bridge between his wintry features and the dry, harsh summers of his demeanour.

_Easy there, _Lee reminded himself, smile souring at the imagery. _He’s flesh and borrowed blood, not some chick-lit boy-next-door. _(Then, _Not that there’s anything wrong with chick-lit. _Lee appreciated the quiet feminism of some of those dollar-fifty romance novels.) But still, it had all been easier, somehow, before he’d learned Gaara had a soul. Then, Lee knew that he could slip their odd tender moment beneath the gauzy cover of scandal; Tenten and Neji’s quiet disapproval, bearing down on them like rain against fragile windows, had been more familiar territory than the inquisitive scrutiny they failed to hide now. Though he was relieved to know Gaara (and his siblings, of course) felt love and remorse, and that they had something human to cling to as they worked through centuries-old trauma – and beyond relieved to know that Tenten was way less likely to stake him, now – Lee felt as though they were in uncharted territory, now that the road blocks of the strict Slayers’ code had been pushed aside.

When Tenten nudged him in the side, Lee nearly jumped out of his Sketchers. She was unfazed as ever, calmly readjusting her cowboy hat as she fished their (fake) IDs from her bum bag. “What are you drinking?” she wanted to know.

“Just water,” said Lee, and then: “No, it’s on me.” Tenten arched a quizzical eyebrow. “We came into some cash recently,” he explained, pulling a face. The bills they’d pulled from the ashy remains of Kakuzu’s robes were edged in brown, blood stiffening their creases, but money was money. Even Lee was not so high and mighty as to pretend otherwise.

“Suit yourself,” Tenten relented. She twisted to wad her wallet back in her bag, and her gaze wandered to a booth at the far side of the hall, where Lee saw the dim lights catch on a glimpse of red – and where he knew she was watching the shadows melt from a mess of dark hair and Banana Republic.

“How’s it going with you two?” Lee had to ask. There never was anything new to report, but Lee was a romantic at heart: maybe something would have happened in the week of his absence. Tenten only rolled her eyes, her spine stiff as a stake as she drove her posture into the ground.

“It _isn’t_. We’re friends, Lee, and that’s all we ever will be,” she sighed. Before he could protest, she went on: “Don’t! There’s no point in thinking about it, okay?” She splayed her hands. “Like, what if we did get together, and we broke up? Would two months of railing his skinny ass really be worth me jeopardising seven years of friendship – or our whole relationship with our Watcher? You know, the one that _lives _depend on?” Once more, her eyebrows went up, and Lee watched worry crease her forehead, her gaze clouding with some distant sadness. “Maybe you could justify that, but I couldn’t.”

Lee’s throat was tight. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve seen those pining looks he gives you,” said Tenten, after a beat. “Like you’re the sun, and he’s somehow not vampirically allergic.” A protest had barely risen on Lee’s lips before Tenten barrelled on, her voice as gritty as shoreside sand, and her words sharp as the rocks buried underneath it. “We can’t _afford_ anything like this, Lee,” she insisted. “We’re tracking down a cult of super-vamps that have already brutally killed two of our neighbours. There’s no room to . . . ” As quickly as it had come in, the stormy tide of her anger came slamming back down against her words, scrambling back into the depths.With her eyes darting to and fro, face gaunt in the shadows of that cowboy hat she insisted on keeping on, she seemed to be drowning in that sea. “Until we take Hidan and the Akatsuki out, we’re living on borrowed time,” she whispered, at last. “We have to make every moment count toward our goals. There’s no time to waste on ourselves.”

Lee rolled his lips, throwing his gaze to the ceiling. It was a patchwork of floodlights and bunting, and the star-spangled banner stretching between the rafters was made all the more looming as the neon glows caught on its stripes, the dazzle of lights on polyester throwing fifty stars into a constellation. Beneath it, Lee’s shadow was small and sulking, cramped by the crowd around him – and the way their spring-break buzzes ran rampant around him. Buried deep inside him was someone still just nineteen (or twenty-three, on his ID), someone who longed to hide behind his sweater and dungarees like so many more layers of himself as he searched for a way out, his half-baked excuses cramped and slanted as his weary bones. But that part of Lee had been small for some time now: since Gai got sick, maybe, or since Hanabi Hyuga’s disastrous bat mitzvah. So instead, he drew a smile from the depths of his core, and let it hover on his lips until the cacophony around him lifted into music once more.

“Coming here was your idea,” he teased Tenten. “And doesn’t Gai always tell us to live while we’re young?”

Her grin toddled dutifully along. “You mean,” she relented, at last, “while we’re definitely legally in our twenties.”

“Let’s have _fun_ tonight, Tenten,” said Lee, punching her lightly in the shoulder. “Make every moment count for our _own_ sakes.”

Tenten’s laugh was wry. “As long as you’re still buying.”

“Come on, come on, come on— _no_!”

“Ha-_ha_!”

Tenten’s fists were a blur of tan skin and pink bracelets as she pumped them in the air, trailing ever so slightly behind the whirlwind of her body as she turned to pull Lee, Gaara, and Neji into a hug. “Suck it,” she crowed, to the grizzled Sunan man across the beer pong table. Her last shot had wobbled around the rim of the tumbler in dizzying circles, but landed in the cheap bourbon at last – winning their team the unofficial championships they’d started at the back of the bar. “Suck it!” yelled Tenten again. “I am the beer pong _queen_!”

“You’re a _bitch_, is what you are,” grumbled the man. For a moment, Lee felt the mood crack: the stuffy air of the parlour seemed to solidify along barbed lines like some great cloud of fibreglass, and the dancers on the floor seemed to move with the desperate intent of a swarm of ants over a carcass as the music grew tinny around them. But as soon as Lee had fixed the stranger with his most withering look, and felt Tenten stiffen beside him, one of the man’s friends had drawn him away – the crisis was averted.

“Feh!” spat Neji, glaring in the stranger’s general direction. “Damned bastard.” His east-coast, bada-bing accent had come out in full force to meet his third – or was it fourth? – shot of tequila, hard consonants and sharp vowels an uneasy brace against sentences he might otherwise have slurred. Lee felt his dismay mingle with the laughter Neji’s swaying figure prompted, and he shook his head as the snicker bubbled up in his throat.

“Is that what classifies as a ‘_khnyok_?’” he sounded out carefully, and Neji brightened, delighted he knew the word. His smile set Tenten off, and the two of them dissolved into mocking laughter as they volleyed insults back and forth, high voices edging the corners of their shared anger upward like a band-aid off of skin that man had probably thought the wrong colour. Lee had to laugh along, in the end, shaking his head.

“The South is the worst,” he admonished. Gaara pretended to preen.

“But don’t you just lo-o-ove our hats?” he crooned. His voice was lazy as it poked through the cloud of whiskey on his breath, its brassy twang melted into something malleable and soft. Given his willowy frame and, more importantly,his all-around lack of blood, Neji had decided Gaara wasn’t to exceed a one-drink limit. As it was, half a glass of stiff _“Jonin Daniels”_ had been enough to colour his cheeks a delicate pink and his speech with a slight slur – and to convince him to swipe the ten-gallon hat from Tenten’s head, wearing it on his own as though it were a crown. Even Lee was moved to roll his eyes, his laugh scoffing and sharp as he tapped the brim of the hat.

“Sure I do, _pardner_,” Lee teased him back. Gaara’s nose wrinkled with his smile, and Lee noticed dark smudges of kohl across his eyelids. Tenten must have talked him into it, he supposed, and had to note it was a good look: the black pencil made his blue eyes glitter bright and clear as opals, and his gaze all the more piercing.

Gaara ducked his head low when Lee told him as much, hands, skeletal in the dim lighting, straying to toy with the collar of his shirt. His fingers were just as jarringly pale as the starched white cotton, and just as stiff. Even after all the trouble they’d gone through bugging and de-bugging their Sunday best for the vampires, Gaara had been hard-pressed to worm into anything more casual than a button-down and jeans that actually fit. With his collar turned up to Dracula points to hide the scars on his neck and his red curls a mop over his brow, Lee thought calling Gaara _“dorky”_ might have been the understatement of the millennium (or at least its turn). But as he beckoned for his friend to take his arm, he knew he wouldn’t have it any other way. Gaara was just growing into his skin, after all. Could Lee really ask for anything more?

He decided, after a beat, he could. “Come on,” he urged Gaara, as Neji and Tenten set their sights on another round of beer pong, “let’s dance.” Lee hadn’t been drinking, but he’d had two cherry colas, so far, and the sugar ran wild through his veins – just as it did the conversation. Every time their laughter ran thin, it felt as though the sodas’ bubbles had gone flat, leaving the space between them all too sticky. Lee longed to pump the air full of new life, for his own sake.

Gaara only shook his head, stray curls bouncing with the motion. “I need to get some water,” he explained. “Come with me to the bar?”

“Yeah,” Lee rushed to answer, “of course.” He was patient as Gaara gingerly, hesitantly linked their fingers together, letting himself be led back through the crowd. Every so often, Lee would look back toward him, and he’d feel his stomach turn as Tenten’s words echoed in his head: _“those pining looks,” _she’d mumbled; _“like you’re the sun.” _Was it true? Once Gaara had opened up, he’d stumbled neatly into the pitfall of _“earnest,” _but Lee didn’t think he’d fallen so deep into something so mysterious and dark as to turn to heliolatry.

“Easy there,” Lee chided himself, for the second time that night. _We’re here to have fun. _That, Lee was pretty sure he could manage.

“All good?” Gaara wanted to know. Lee squeezed his hand, helping him onto a barstool.

“The goodest,” he promised. He signalled to the bartender as he slid next to Gaara, brightening his voice with a smile before it had taken form against his lips. “Could we get a glass of your very finest water?”

“And some boiled peanuts,” added Gaara. Lee brightened.

“And two Moon Pies!”

“What, ah, what’s a Moon Pie?”

“You’ll see.”

When the time came for Gaara to do so, his startled laughter zinged off the light fixtures like marbles from a slingshot gone astray, and his eyes were sparkling. “It’s . . . it’s just air!” he marvelled, pressing down on the half of the cookie he hadn’t eaten. “It feels solid, but it’s just sticky air!”

“The wonders of gelatine and high-fructose corn syrup,” Lee announced, as Gaara broke the next piece of Moon Pie into his mouth, grinning wildly at the prospect of a food that did not require the use of his teeth. It may just barely have been spring, but as always, Gaara’s laugh reminded Lee of the summer, drier and steadier than anything in the heady crush of the bar. When he slid his eyes shut against the hot glare of the neon lights, Lee was tempted to imagine the red glow around them was some beachside bonfire, the dull hum of the lightbulbs the whirr of cicadas or the drone of honeybees. Indeed, the warmth to trace across his skin where Gaara’s thigh brushed his was softer than the stickiness around them, his touch light as a swaying reed.

“Oh, one sec.”

They’d nearly finished (and in Gaara’s case, sobered up) when Lee stopped Gaara with a hand on his knee, letting his smile flicker and dim with the neon lights above them. Gaara blinked, the smudges of kohl on his eyelids fluttering like bats’ wings as they flicked up and down.

“‘Oh?’”

“You have marshmallow on your nose,” said Lee. Then, before he really knew what they were, a new tumble of words fell from his lips. “Here,” he blurted out, laying his hand on Gaara’s cheek, “let me.”

They sat close enough for Lee to hear Gaara’s breath catch as he inched closer, and see the soft pink shape of his mouth thin along jagged creases as he drew his lower lip under his teeth. His own pulse, erratic though it was, sounded in frantic time to the music in the background, and Lee found himself grateful Gaara sat to his left – he wouldn’t have heard it. If nothing else, it was the cover he needed to school his features, and tighten his fingers against the cool plane of Gaara’s skin. His movements were deft and clinical as he swiped the offending marshmallow from Gaara’s nose.

Gaara’s gaze, though, was dreamy and faraway, some unspoken future playing out across the quick angles of his face as his body rushed to catch up. “You wanted to dance?” he hazarded, his voice wobbling. He’d pressed his lips together tightly, but wonder still tugged at his features, still threatened to dart out from behind his eyelids as he blinked, blinked, blinked. Lee’s cheeks were warm. Burning.

“I did.” Lee forgot, sometimes, that Gaara was a hair’s breadth taller than he was. He wore that height awkwardly, cramming himself onto a borrowed perch in Lee’s shadow, as though the world beyond the two of them was off-limits. All Lee could think to do was lead him forward – make that world a little bit bigger.

It proved quickly to be a futile effort. “Don’t go chickening out on me now, man!” Lee cried, rocking back on his heels as they edged toward the dancefloor. Gaara shook his head furiously.

“On the contrary, I’ll be doing just that,” he insisted. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t dance!”

“Sure you do!” Even as the cirrus of the crowd around him broke into neat strata of line-dancers, the snare drum pale and tinny as it warred against off-rhythm cowboy boots tapping against the hardwood floor, Lee was determined to feel the music deep in his bones, and his fumbling pulse. He would never have called himself a dancer, but he was other things: a Slayer, and a fighter, and a gymnast before either of those. His floor routines may have been daunting, but if Gai had taught him anything over the years (aside from the importance of eating breakfast and standing up for oneself) it was that a steady four-four was the universe’s way of pushing one forward – and, when necessary, over the edge.

But if Gaara was ordinarily willowy and reedy, he stood like the trunk of the tree, now, and his arms had taken root as he folded them tightly across his chest. “I promise, Lee. I don’t. I _can’t_.”

“_Everyone_ can dance,” said Lee stubbornly, recalling what Tenten had told him once. “It’s just like . . . like kissing. If you can kiss, you can dance.”

“Who said anything about _that_?” demanded Gaara, eyes wide. The wink crept across the muscles of Lee’s face like a spasm, but he rode it out with the sunniest confidence he could muster up, and his grin flashed just as madly.

“Live a little,” he urged Gaara, who scoffed.

“Over my undead body.”

His walls were edging in, Lee knew, inching up his stubborn carriage like so much ivy – but Gaara’s gaze was still hopeful, and Lee (letting the distant rhythm beat his heart for him, settling into a levity he hadn’t felt since he’d last seen the sun) decided he’d take the plunge. Gaara’s hands found an instinctive hold in his: this time, Lee saw the whirlwind of expressions dancing across his features struggle to keep up with the rest of him, his steps blind and trusting as he let Lee tug him onto the dancefloor.

Gaara had not been lying: he truly couldn’t dance. It wasn’t, Lee wanted to think, that he was _bad_ – rather, he seemed at a genuine loss as to how to move his limbs outside of prim, measured steps, drawing careful do-si-dos from some dusty old repertoire as gingerly as he might have discarded letters from a fireplace. His pale hands trembled against the sure, dark lines of Lee’s, all blurry white shapes to the strict contours of Lee’s friendship bracelets and the old scars against his skin. The sight reminded him of that old movie, _The Wizard of Otogakure_, where the main character stepped from black-and-white to colour film. If Gaara was shrouded in the sepia of his home century, and Lee was eager to pull him into the warm fold of his Kodachrome world, bright under all that neon. (Everything looked _better_ under neon signs, anyway.)

“Loosen up your hips,” Lee suggested, raising his voice to catch the fleeting gaps in Gaara’s breathless giggling (and the insistent banjo behind them). “Let them move on their own, see?”

He slid lightly away from Gaara to pull his sweater from over his head, before pressing in close again, watching his reflection warp in Gaara’s wide eyes as he absentmindedly sashayed to and fro, drawing lazy patterns with the movements of his hips. He’d barely heard Gaara’s breath catch before he saw him push forward, clumsily hooking his fingers through the belt loops of Lee’s overalls.

“Now who’s dancing?” Lee prompted him, twisting a startled yelp into something high and crooning. Gaara was still wearing the cowboy hat, and he ducked low beneath its brim. Heat radiated from his face, pressed close to Lee’s, but he didn’t let go.

“M-maybe I thought I’d, uh, try some hands-on learning,” he said, all in a rush. For a moment, all Lee could do was balk, staring without really seeing anything; the pulsing lights and the neon signs and the electricity crackling through the great storm cloud of the crowd made him feel like he was drowning in a lava lamp, and Gaara, pressed against him, was just as bright and foreign.

“Was that a line?” asked Lee, at last. He felt the line of Gaara’s shoulders stiffen against his.

“Would it be okay if it was?”

For a moment, Lee felt his lips twist into a squiggle, the words driving into his system like a shot of Novocain. Anything he could think of to say felt like a shot in the dark – but then, Lee reminded himself, taking a shuddery breath, he was a Slayer. He was trained to work under the cover of the night.

_ “Live a little,” _he’d insisted. _“Make every moment count.”_

When he took his next measured breath, Lee felt it rock against his bones, coursing through him like a babbling brook over stones. Somewhere – maybe behind him, or inside him, or tearing at the tiny space between he and Gaara – that unsteadiness rocked like the arms of the ocean, and the two of them bobbed idly at its churning surface, two harmless buoys against the storm around them. Even Gaara’s stare was watery, when Lee lifted his chin to meet it.

“Do you wanna get out of here?” he broached, a foreign hope lacing his words. Gaara nodded shyly. For a moment, he seemed a careless sketch of himself, all wispy hair and faint colours. But his smile came brighter than even the neon, in the end; Lee remembered, then, that he treasured the sight.

“Do you know a place?” Gaara countered, hovering on the threshold of his defences – those fences they’d both forgotten to mend along the way. Lee shrugged, offering Gaara his hand.

“We can find one.”

The _“place”_came to them in the form of the roof, a plain of rolled asphalt and tarred corners almost indistinguishable from the dark sky above it, the moonlight catching on small cracks and edges like stitching along some great quilt. Though the bar had been a Pollock painting of flashing colours and flailing limbs, and the air abuzz with sound, the night outside was still. Lee had read countless novels where the night sky was described as _“velvet,”_but never before had he thought the epithet fitting: never before had he thought darkness as something wholly welcoming, and never before had he been so relaxed as he sank back against its gentle drape across the skyline. He thought he might get used to the feeling – the idea that any hour past midnight wasn’t inherently a threat.

“It’s sort of beautiful, don’t you think?”

Gaara’s voice rasped against the twisting lines of his lips as he sat down, swinging his legs over the edge of the roof. “The city, I mean. It’s so . . . so _alive_.”

“Are you for real? Nobody’s even awake.”

“But they could be. Tomorrow, they will be,” said Gaara hotly. His eyes were shining. “Everyone below us, and around us, they’ve all got their own stories. We’ll never matter to them.”

_We might, _thought Lee, feeling the cool air edge into the whisper promise of a gale behind him. _If we don’t stop Hidan, and he makes his way South, we’ll have “_mattered_.” We’ll be responsible. _But Gaara’s eyes were shining, and he’d tentatively let his shoulders drop. Lee slowly sat down next to him.

“I’ve never thought of it that way,” he admitted. Lee might slowly have been learning to let go – or, he’d decided to try, as they’d clambered up the rickety ladder to the roof – but he could scarcely imagine a world he didn’t exist at the centre of. Was that _“living in the moment?”_ For all he’d talked about it, Lee was trained to stay a good three steps ahead of everyone around him: trained to think being caught in the moment meant one was already late.

Then again, he was also trained to kill vampires. Perhaps training could take a back seat.

Gaara’s fingers were drumming out a careful waltz against the roofing, and Lee watched his chest rise and fall with the same irregular rhythm: one, two, three, one-two-three, onetwothree, came his breathing, catching and halting as it shuddered into celerity. His own breathing had abandoned musicality entirely to twist around his pursed lips and the staccato of his pulse, and so it was as much for his own sake as it was Gaara’s that Lee laid a chary hand on his knee, fingers almost mothlike as he toyed with the neat grain of Gaara’s jeans.

“It’s cold, is what it is,” he decided, at last. He’d shucked off his sweater earlier, of course, but Lee wondered if that was the only reason his skin had begun to pebble underneath the too-tight cotton of his T-shirt.

Gaara’s only answer was to inch that much closer, snaking an arm around his waist. This deep into the heart of the big city, there were no stars, but the moon was nearly full; Gaara cut a sharp-boned silhouette against it, only the quickest angles of his high cheekbones and upturned nose catching the silver glow. Everything else was as soft and intangible as that velvety darkness, and Lee was half-temped to reach out, if only to prove he was real.

He didn’t. Instead, he began tracing his thumb in slow circles across Gaara’s knee – the way he himself had done as he’d tended to him after Kakuzu’s attack. The disasters they’d faced in Ame didn’t quite feel as distant as the miles on the road maps proclaimed they were. When Lee straightened, the night’s velvet seemed to belong to some great cosmic stage curtain, waiting patiently to rise for a new crop of horrors. There was a part of him that worried that hope was as in as desperately short supply as the stars.

But then Gaara nudged him in the side, his fingers fluttering against the small of Lee’s back. “I saved that second Moon Pie,” he said, flashing a tiny grin. “Do you want to split it?”

“Sure,” breathed Lee. He lay his head against Gaara’s shoulder as he watched him fumble with the plastic wrapper – and resolved quickly enough to take over, his own movements far quicker and surer than Gaara’s as he ripped the packaging open.

“Thanks,” Gaara laughed. Lee grinned.

“Don’t mention it. Opening pre-sealed bags is tough for the best of us.”

Gaara shifted slightly against him, winding his other arm around Lee’s middle, as well. Lee leaned gratefully back against him, letting Gaara’s chin fall to the crook of his neck. “Here,” he called, “you can take the bigger piece.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” said Gaara, as he reached to accept. Lee smirked.

“Be careful you don’t get any on your nose this time.”

“No promises.” Gaara’s laughter skipped against his breastbone like a stone across a pond, and the motions tickled against Lee’s spine where he pressed against him. The heat dancing in patches between the spaces their skin touched wasn’t quite his own: it was as tingly and unfamiliar as the Sunan streetlights below, countless electric testaments to a new city – to a new frontier. When he spoke once more, his voice had taken on the same buzzing edge.

“I changed my mind,” Lee told Gaara, twisting against his chest to watch his blue eyes widen. “I wanted the bigger piece. Can I have yours?”

“Seriously?” Gaara’s stare might have been icy, but it was slated to melt with the rest of the winter as April dawned around them. “You gave it to me fair and square!”

“‘No promises,’” Lee quipped back to him. Gaara ducked low behind the brim of the hat he’d yet to take off, but he relented: folding the last crumbly bit of pastry into Lee’s waiting palm.

“You’ll be the undeath of me,” he admonished. Lee batted wide eyes up at him, and watched emotions flicker across Gaara’s face – hope, yearning, and finally a wide, easy smile – before he ducked his head low again. “You’re, um, healing well,” he blurted, lifting Lee’s left wrist with both his hands. It was true: the fang marks against his skin were faintas dewdrops, now, and just as inconsequential. Lee shrugged, feeling his shoulderblades roll against Gaara’s shirt through the thin fabric of his own. Somewhere above him, Gaara was still talking, but his words were barely eddies of wind through the willows of their tangled limbs; with the sugar sticky on his lips, Lee could content himself with being not-quite-warm and hesitantly safe against Gaara’s frame.

“—your nose,” came Gaara’s voice, after a beat, only just hard enough to coax Lee from his reverie.

“What?” he asked, and he watched Gaara’s eyes crinkle upward with his smile.

“You have marshmallow on your nose!”

“I do not!” he cried, bolting upward. Gaara only grinned wider.

“You do too!” he protested, through a haze of giggles. Lee shook his head adamantly, but Gaara wouldn’t be deterred: he took Lee by either hand to pull him close again, before tilting Lee’s chin up with his forefinger and thumb. “See?” he asked, swiping his thumb across Lee’s nose and flashing its sticky pad in triumph. “Marshmallow.”

“Well, _now_ there’s no marshmallow,” he shot back. Gaara still sat primly on the edge of the roof, legs crossed neatly at the ankle, but he shifted once more to let Lee stretch his legs across his lap, and to hit Lee jokingly on the head with the cowboy hat as he tugged it free.

“Who says I got all of it?”

He spoke in a rush once more, and Lee could feel the slow, rocking motions of what was left of his pulse kick into high gear against the bloodless arteries of his legs. Lee cocked an eyebrow, watching Gaara’s eyes go wide and his gaze dart from side to side in a mounting fluster. As adamantly as he’d pursued those trusting smiles and rare peals of laughter, when he’d first been getting to know Gaara, Lee enjoyed watching him squirm, now, grinning as he watched Gaara wrinkle his nose through a hesitant smile of his own.

“C’mere,” whispered Gaara. Lee inched dutifully forward, straightening as best he could against his uneven perch against the roof and Gaara’s lap. Gaara was no more steady, his hands trembling like the new leaves on the trees below as he flattened his palm against Lee’s cheek, his forehead brushing against Lee’s as he rocked back on his haunches.

There centimetres between them might have been lightyears, in that moment, and their heartbeats pounded against one another with intent that could have cracked the tarmac beneath them. For all Lee had questioned the claim, he really did feel that the night was alive, then: the air between them was charged with all the limerence of the early spring, and Lee felt his breathing move like the wind against lips skittering like butterflies’ wings. Only the gleam to Gaara’s eye seemed at odds with the scene – gaze sparkling like stars the city hadn’t seen in a century.

Lee didn’t know who leaned in, who closed the gap. Perhaps it hadn’t happened at all. For a moment, those butterfly-wing flitters seemed to dart like a wasp’s, instead, and Gaara jerked back like he’d been stung – but before Lee could question it, he’d leaned back in, and pressed their lips together once more. His touch was desperate, fervent; his hands roamed from his cheeks to his neck and back again, never quite finding home. All Lee could think to do was push back, balling his hands into fists at Gaara’s chest, feeling his friend’s weak pulse struggle into time against his own, irregular and jittery. It wasn’t until he felt himself sway over the edge of the roof Lee thought to pull back for air, breathing hard into the thin space between them. He hadn’t quite opened his eyes yet, but he felt the telltale scrape of skin against skin as Gaara rested their foreheads together.

“I, ah, I’m real fond of you, you know,” said Gaara, perhaps unnecessarily. “I think I have been for a while now.”

“Oh, really?” The moon was high above them, and Lee wondered, absentmindedly, if it pushed the two of them back and forth as it did the distant tides. For all the state borders they’d crossed together, it was the first time Lee had ever so thoroughly crossed a line. His pulse pounded fervently at his ribs with the thought, and Lee willed it to slow – but it didn’t, not until he felt the Gaara’s lips trace the scar on his wrist, whose veins pounded just as heavily.

“What about you?” Gaara’s voice was faint, and not just breathless. Lee felt his lips, burning with the ghost of their kiss, twitch upwards with a smile as he hugged Gaara close, whispering into the mess of his curls.

“Of course,” he breathed, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. Then, before he could stop himself, “I need to tell Tenten.”

Lee wasn’t sure why he said it – if it was the mission that drove him, or if he was already barrelling steadily down tracks that he knew he had to share with his best friend. Perhaps it was the dull shots of silver through that inky night around them that brought poor Neji to mind, and the blueprints of a romance so much less star-crossed than their own. All Lee knew for sure was that Gaara stiffened against him, what little blood he had running cold.

“No you don’t,” he scrambled to say, hurdling over the unasked _“why.”_ “No, Lee. It doesn’t have to matter to anyone else, remember?” He jolted away from Lee, and the warring blues and blacks of his wide eyes and wider pupils reminded Lee of the Arctic ocean, icy and stormy and fathomless. “Nobody needs to know,” he pleaded. Lee felt his brow crease along a furrow he’d all but forgotten.

“We know,” he said simply. Gaara shook his head furiously.

“I knew this was a mistake.”

“Knew _what_ was a mistake? _Kissing_ me?”

“_Following_ you!” spat Gaara, whirling to his feet – before sinking just as suddenly to his knees. “Gods, don’t you know what it’s like— no,” he cut himself off, “no, of course you don’t. You’ve got no _idea_ what it’s like to be around _you_! Around someone so positive and so kind and so willing to trust . . . ” He let his voice trail off, bringing his head into his hands. “I can’t do this,” he decided.

Lee felt the night chill lodge itself deep in his bones as he reached out toward Gaara, and the wind cracked across his face like a whip as Gaara darted backwards once more. “What are you _talking_ about?” he pleaded, wringing his hands. “Gaara, please. We . . . we don’t have to . . . we can slow down if you’re uncomfortable, or—”

“It isn’t about me,” said Gaara, darkly. “It’s about _you. _You deserve better than this. I was just too stupid to think of it until you decided you wanted to bring the other _humans_ into all of this.”

Lee said the only thing he could think to. “You’ve always been human to me, Gaara.”

“Maybe thinking that was a mistake, too.”

He wasted no time with skittering, halting gestures when Lee reached toward him again: this time, when Gaara stood, he was steadier than Lee had seen him in a long, long while – since they’d first met, maybe. That had been outside a dingy dance bar not unlike this one, and the only thing Gaara had pressed to him then had been a stake, something that so adamantly refused to kill either of them. Lee’s head was swimming – but he couldn’t, for the life of him (or for the _un_life of anyone else) pry himself from the edge of the roof. All he could do was call out, his voice cutting as weakly through the darkness as the invisible starlight.

“Gaara, please stay,” he pleaded. But it was no use: Gaara was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> realised recently my top 3 loves in life are edea lee, rock lee, and lee pace. wonder what that says about mee


	9. Waterfalls

“And . . . switch!”

Lee knew it was to no avail, but he scowled into his Spandex all the same. He could feel the muscles in his right arm buzz in protest, tugging at their knotted fibres in hopes that they could tear apart entirely – and his left, folded up behind his back, was cold and limp as a dead fish. The muscles there were of little help as he switched arms; though his shoulders cried out in relief for the brief moment both palms were on the floor, they played a different tune as Lee shifted into another one-armed plank. Gai insisted the exercise was paramount to steadying the core – but Gai, Lee could hardly help but note, was sitting comfortably in his wheelchair, laughing cheerily as Special Agent Kakashi Hatake twirled the stopwatch around his finger.

“You’ve got four minutes to go,” called Kakashi, most unhelpfully. In the week of Lee’s absence, he’d quite thoroughly made himself at home: case files littered the room like so much rated-PG-13 confetti, and a bevy of his cheap suits were strewn across the sofa. Chess pieces and wrinkled Monopoly property cards stuck from the pockets ofmonogrammed sweatpants Lee thought looked suspiciously familiar (and he didn’t recall playing for the Isobu High Mathletes _alongside_ an FBI agent). But if Kakashi could sense Lee’s distaste, shivering from his muscles along with any last strength buried deep beneath them, he didn’t show it. He toyed mindlessly with the frayed knee of his (stolen) sweatpants as he read from the stopwatch: “Three and a half.”

He laughed at the notion, but there was no mirth to his smile. His eyes, flinty-grey in the dim shrouding the kitchen, were cold and intelligent, and Lee imagined he could see gears grinding behind his steely gaze as he turned back to the game of chess between he and Gai. The carved abalone pieces – antiques, handed down in the Hyuga family for generations – seemed jarringly out of place against the board: an old cereal box whose squares were Sharpie’d on. The original board was in shattered pieces in a box below Neji’s bed. Lee had once broken off one of its _intarsia_ corners to stake a vampire who’d shown up at their Kumo apartment instead of the pizza guy.

Still, neither Kakashi nor the stopwatch, nor either of their dogged insistences that Lee had two minutes left in his left-armed plank, could stop him from flying to his feet as the door jumped on its hinges. Tenten had lost her key a few months ago, somewhere deep in a newly Turned vampire’s jugular, and the only thing to squeak louder than her Nikes on the laminate floor was her indignation at the locked door. Indeed, when she pounded on the door once more, he could hear her muttering through the heavy wood. “Oh, for the love of the gods,” she was saying. “Motherfu—”

Lee’s fingers had barely grazed the doorknob before Kakashi wrenched it backward, and this time, it was Tenten who jumped. Lee had watched the words form on her frown before she seemed to know what she was saying, and cringed alongside Neji and Gai as she scrambled to catch herself. “Motherfu-uh— _Fatima_! Mother Fatima, comma, children of. I have religious studies homework,” she babbled, twirling a strand of hair around her finger. Its ruddy tip deepened quickly into blue, and this time, Tenten couldn’t keep herself from swearing.

Though the whole apartment seemed to be perched on a tightrope, a thousand questions wrestling beneath the safety net of social niceties, Kakashi spoke without so much as a _“hello.” _“How was cheer practice, Miss Pema-Sherpa?” he wanted to know, his tone clipped and officious. Lee watched Tenten’s eyebrows shoot up into her bangs.

“Very cheery,” she answered, after a beat.

“And your road trip to Suna?”

“Very Sunan.”

For a moment, all was still: even the wind stopped whistling outside, and the humidity seemed to dart behind the cloud cover, trying in vain to hide from the night around it – around all of them. Tenten’s thousand-yard-stare was cramped uneasily into the measly square footage of the apartment; Lee’s pinged wildly off the walls, darting to and fro with desperate fervour. This time, only Gai seemed immune to the tension: he cut the threads of any burgeoning interrogation with a pointed smile, wheeling himself toward the door. “How do we all feel about burritos for dinner?” he wanted to know. Tenten was clearly glum, but she spoke up all the same.

“Can you get Pop-Tarts, too? If the corner store is still open?”

“And milk,” Lee added. “We’re out.”

“This shopping list is getting long,” chuckled Gai, ruffling Lee’s hair as he passed him. “Neji, will you come with me? Help carry it all?”

Neji’s voice echoed coldly from the depths of his room. “I’m busy,” he protested. “Can’t Agent Hatake go with you?”

“‘Agent Hatake’ is busier than you are, boy. He needed our fax machine.” A small, bitter part of Lee had to wonder why – and whether or not their fax machine had somehow been relocated to their board game collection, or perhaps the fridge, so much more barren than when he had left. Kakashi, for his part, straightened with Gai’s words.

“Don’t worry, kids,” he said, flashing another not-quite-smile, “I’ll hold down the fort.”

Lee cut him off without thinking. “So will we,” he insisted. “Tenten, come on, we need to stretch.”

Tenten would undoubtedly have stretched at cheer practice, but she didn’t protest. Her gaze was coolly knowing as she flung her jacket to the sofa, and settled down on the yoga mat beside Lee. He was sure they made a fetching pair. His legs were long, and flush with either side of the wall as he worked into a showy straddle; Tenten cracked her knuckles loudly as she pretended to stretch her wrists. Though they sat to face each other, Lee’s stare never wavered from Kakashi’s impassive frown, and he could feel Tenten grow expectant beside him.

“I thought you said you had religious studies homework,” said Kakashi at last, pursing his lips. Lee felt Tenten shift against him, and watched the spectre of her frown dance in harried reflection across Kakashi’s own; he countered her shock with something dull and unfamiliar – the kind of weary disappointment Lee didn’t think anyone under thirty could physically emulate.

“I’m stretching first,” Tenten shot back. Lee hoped his smile was disarming as he turned it on Kakashi, but his teeth ground against each other, and his lips twitched at their pin corners.

“Stretching after a workout is really important,” he offered, nonetheless. “And not just because it helps you stay flexible! It, uh, helps eliminate lactic acid build-up.” When Kakashi’s only answer was a cocked eyebrow, Lee decided to barrel on. “Which, you know, keeps you from getting sore. And you won’t—”

“Thank you, Mr Lee.” Kakashi did not sound thankful. “I’ve read the _Magic School Bus_ special on the topic.”

“Assigned reading with the FBI, is it?” Tenten piped up, crossing her arms. “I can just imagine your contract. Clause four-twenty, subsection sixty-nine: ‘All agents must quote children’s books, move into strangers’ houses, and play board games with their dads.’”

Once more, Kakashi refrained from rising to the bait. Instead, he steepled his fingers, leaning back in the rickety kitchen chair. Though rubber coatings sat on the ends of its metal legs, the chair still screeched against the floor with Kakashi’s slow, rocking movements, and he watched with an impassive frown as both Lee and Tenten clapped their hands over their ears at the sound. Then, suddenly, he straightened. “Which one of you is the closet goth?” he demanded. Lee knit his eyebrows, but Kakashi had found his groove. “_My_ guess is your friend Third Eye Blind.”

“Neji’s not _blind_!” Lee snapped (though ninety percent of the time, he was). “He’s just extremely photosensitive, and also nearsighted.”

“And a grade-A enigma.” Kakashi spread his hands, though his expression was far from hapless. “Look, kid, whatever he is, the boy owns enough old leather grimoires to fill a haunted house, and I saw him pack an honest-to-gods voodoo doll before he and Sweet Valley High here went to join you in Suna. Add that to all the crosses and horseshoes on the walls, and the vials of _blood _in your fridge, well . . . ” He shrugged, as though it were the easiest thing in the world: as though the air wasn’t thick as miasma, condensing ever further as the apartment dropped through shades of _“freezing.”_ “Either someone in the house is a one-man Rasputina cover band,” Kakashi reasoned, “or something doesn’t add up.”

Lee feared he knew all too well what he meant, but he had to ask. “What do you mean, ‘add up?’”

Kakashi leaned back in the chair once more – but this time, Lee knew what was coming. He grit his teeth against the scrape of metal on plastic, and imagined the sound boxing him in: that the screech was sharp in more than just pitch, some invisible barbed wire straightening his posture and wrapping around his throat to keep him from sinking into it.

“I mean,” said Kakashi, “that Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha weren’t killed at random. They were slaughtered in some kind of _ritual_. Symbols drawn in blood, amulets littering the crime scenes . . . whoever offed these two wasn’t just drinking the Kool-Aid, they were making it.”

Lee could see himself in Tenten’s eyes: a tiny, blocky reflection, whose harsh contours waned and waxed like the moon – and whose face was just as unreadable. The night seemed to hang from tent poles around them, balanced too delicately to move forward, not without falling; time might have been racing past or standing stock-still, and Lee wouldn’t have known. All he could count were his heartbeats, and they scrabbled at the edges of his too-tight chest with a rhythm as unreliable as any B-grade remix. When he did speak, his voice was hoarse.

“I promise you,” he told Kakashi, “there’s no Kool-Aid here. We’re a Capri Sun household, through and through.”

“Cute.” Once more, Kakashi didn’t look like he meant it. “And let me guess – not only are you _not_ going to elaborate, you’re going to take this as your cue to up and disappear again, right? Take another conveniently timed road trip?”

Tenten scowled as she moved to help Lee from the floor. “I _was_ just thinking that I might have left some stuff at school,” she grumbled. “How did you know, John McClane?”

“I’m FBI,” boasted Kakashi. “I know people. It’s my job.”

But as Lee watched Kakashi’s gaze trail to the great crucifix over their altar, and saw his fingers twitch in the sign of the cross against the worn wood of the kitchen table, he couldn’t help but feel that Kakashi didn’t know very much at all.

_“Crash!”_

“Gah!”

Lee whirled around so quickly he heard his hips crack, sneakers squeaking as they caught on the curb. The watery shadows scattered at his cry, but fluttered quickly back into place: he hadn’t started violently enough to do much more than rush past the tangle of shrubs and tree branches all around him. Soon enough, the suburbs had fallen still and silent once more, his heartbeat the only sound for miles.

“Jumpy tonight, are we?”

Tenten’s footfalls were effortlessly silent, her gait catlike as she padded from the alleyway. “I kicked a trash can,” she explained, half-apologetically. “The street’s clear. It’s just us.”

They didn’t usually schedule patrols for Wednesdays, but tonight, Lee could have picked any number of excuses from the cherry trees lining the curb, and those milky-pink blossoms and tiny leaves would soften their edges into more palatable topics of conversation: turning their midnight jaunt from a deadly hunt into an after-school special. As he edged toward the corner of Church and Main, and watched the moonlight wash everything with a pearly silver, he felt those easy-to-swallow excuses might even have been true. If he and Tenten hadn’t been clutching stakes to their chests as they wandered through suburbia, Lee supposed they might have been anyone: a couple of college kids enjoying the spring night – or at least just getting some air after a fight at home. But the man they’d fought with wasn’t their father, but an agent of the FBI – who apparently suspected them of murder – and they weren’t just college kids, but Slayers. So when Lee rounded the corner, he figured it was natural he didn’t let himself exhale.

Still, as he thought about it, he realised Tenten had been right. He _was_ jumpy – jumpier than even a Slayer ought to have been. While April struggled from the buds and the cracked, cold earth, Lee’s body hummed with all the life of spring, ill-contained in his wiry five-foot-not-a-lot: nerves buzzing and blood pounding in his ears. Even their quiet footsteps seemed to echo down the streets like thunder, and the wind stretched cold fingers after them like any number of vampires clawing themselves from their graves. When the traffic light flickered into the telltale red of _“stop”_ – of stop moving forward, stop pressing, stop-before-you-get-run-over – Lee shivered. It wasn’t necessarily brighter or harsher than usual, but the glare of the light stung all the same. After a week of pooling blood and dim-lit Sunan bars, and of messy, auburn curls, Lee found something uniquely cold about all that red.

“I don’t even know what I did wrong, you know?” he whispered. Tenten stiffened at the sound of his voice, but she took his hand after a moment’s pause.

“I don’t, either,” she sighed. “But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I know what . . . well, I know you had something with him.”

“Yeah,” echoed Lee, with a bitterness he didn’t recognise, “‘something.’” There was a part of Lee whose lips still tingled with the ghost of that kiss, and who felt every cool breeze like a brush of Gaara’s hands against his skin. That part of him wanted more than just _“something”_ – more than the abandoned blueprints of a structure too willowy and uncertain to stand on its own. It was a half-finished draft of a boy tucked deep in the pockets of his very greenest sweater, and it wondered which of them had let the other down.

If Tenten knew, she didn’t voice the thought. Instead, Lee watched her fish her stake from her pocket, letting long, lazy fingers dance across her initials carved in the wood. Tenten had always been particular about her weapons, and she insisted a Slayer was no better than her tools. Lee wasn’t so sure. As important as preparation was, he was not one to turn his nose up at a fallen twig (or antique chess board) if there were no better options at hand. He didn’t waste time fighting opponents to higher ground—

_Which is probably why you end up sinking to their level. _The voice at the back of his mind was mocking and sure, some malicious spider at the centre of a web of contradicting thoughts. When Lee found himself scrambling to come to his own defence, the voice struck again: _You’ve gone soft._

“Let’s keep moving,” he called to Tenten, pushing the image of Gaara further from his mind with each stomp against the pavement. “Check out the fringes of town, and then work back west.”

“A man with a plan,” mused Tenten. “I like that.”

Lee couldn’t help himself. “Nice to know someone does.”

For the stubborn intent with which picket fences and blocky, square houses crisscrossed the far end of town, their neat grid was weak and flimsy against the wild beyond. The wide roads were patchy with potholes, and tall, scratchy grasses poked from every gap in every fence, as though some toddler had scribbled green crayon across the state, with no regard for colouring within the lines. Lee found he welcomed the change. In the town proper, every gust of wind had been a threat, his every step thunderous: there was no room for error, and so each one, each glimpse of the natural world, had sent his heart skipping another beat. As they neared the reservation road and the sparse woods, absentminded splatter-paintings on the great canvas of the night, Lee felt he could exhale.

It was his first mistake.

Tenten was the first to react: the slight change in the wind moved through her bones as easily as it did the thickets, and she swayed like any one of those reeds as she centred her gravity through the moth-eaten soles of her Converse. “Did you hear that?” she breathed, turning slightly away from him. The moonlight had hit the planes of her face in such a way she was all wide angles and plains of tin, but as she edged out from under its glow, her silhouette was nowhere near as solid: she was a wispy afterthought of a girl, and she lent herself with practiced ease to the darkness. Lee felt dumb and clumsy in contrast, watching as the shadows made little effort to blend with the grey heather of his sweatpants. “Hear what?” he asked, dully. Tenten’s breathing was shallow.

“Hear— _oof_!”

Her figure flickered like a shooting star as she tumbled back into the moonlight, and rolled just as quickly out of it. In the dappled shadows of the wild grass, she was as insubstantial as a kinetoscope picture. “Hear _that_!” she tried again, bouncing back to her feet to the echo of a distant crash. “Lee, two o’clock!”

_That _much, Lee could understand. He whirled on his heel, leading with his shoulders as he swept his leg low. _“Thunk!” _The sound of bone on bone was a dull one, and Lee felt a spiderweb of pain erupt beneath his shin. _Good,_ he told himself. That meant he hit something, after all.

Once more, there was little time for reprieve. For all his training in scripture and superstition, Lee fought like the Devil: he whirled and spun like winds the West Coast never saw, never letting his hands or feet graze the pavement for more than a heartbeat at a time. With the world flipping around him and darkness perched uneasily on the sky above, Lee was blind, but what did it matter? The night whistled and shrieked around him, and Lee could feel his opponent’s every move in the wind against his skin, hearing clumsy punches loud and clear.

“Ugh!”

The new voice was a woman’s, her snarl tough as algebra. Tougher still, though, was the sharp tang of blood tacked to the humid night air. The vampire must have fed recently, Lee surmised, and decided he’d say as much to Tenten:

“See if you can find the vic!”

“Think fast!” she called back. Lee hit the ground just as the vampire lunged toward him, and rolled neatly into the arc of Tenten’s throw, catching her stake in one hand. Even armed, Lee wouldn’t let himself fall into the trap of hubris, not again: he spiralled his legs as he shot upward, twin stakes crashing downward before he’d even made it to his feet. From there, he darted, deer-like, backward, expecting the crackling and snapping of embers and ash . . .

. . . but the ash did not come.

“You’re a real pain, Slayer,” grunted the vampire, the fabric of her sleeves rustling dully as she dragged her hands across her mouth. Lee dimly recognised her hoodie as one he’d outgrown in tenth grade. Temari was taller than he was, and the fraying hem barely brushed the starched hem of her bloomers – no longer quite white after what he suspected was a century of use.

“What are you doing here?” Lee would waste no time on pleasantries. Staying on his feet was like surfing a tidal wave as Temari – preternaturally strong – bowled toward him, and Lee could feel every sit-up he’d ever done as he steeled his core against a swipe of her elbow. She wound up being the one to stumble backward, her darting steps serpentine and uneven. She was weak, Lee realised. In the moonglow, he could just see the blood to smear her face was crusty and black.

But if Temari had an explanation, she would not voice it. Desperation crackled like ozone before a storm as she launched herself forward, diving toward Lee. He rolled to the side, and watched her skid forward on the heels of her palms. This time, the scent of blood was more than just a metallic tang: Lee felt it strike against him like a copper pipe, his own blood running fervently cold as it raced from the sight of Temari’s wounds.

The thought gave him pause. Though her high cheekbones were crawling with fangs she hadn’t quite brought forward and her pale skin was a mess of tattered flesh, Lee knew – or, at least, he’d once known – those sharp blue eyes: once watched his reflection laugh and grin in those same glassy surfaces. “Who did this to you?” he asked Gaara’s ghost, searching in vain for any trace of him in his sister’s snarl. Temari’s only answer was to dive.

His bluster dissipated as quickly as the twilight had, giving weakly into the nightfall. Even as he watched her fangs erupt from her gums in a new spray of blood, her scowl flooding with razor-sharp teeth, Lee found himself stuck firmly on the defensive: pinned as neatly to a new code of nonviolence as a butterfly to a board. He wouldn’t hurt Gaara’s sister, he knew – knew it deep in his bones.

Temari had no such reservations. She missed Lee’s crouching figure by half a foot, skidding forward on her knees, but she wasn’t deterred: she flung her hands forward, scrabbling for an anchor – and found one around his neck! “_Hrk_!” Lee choked out. He could feel a shallow breath fluttering beneath her iron grip, but she’d wrested it from him with any last semblance of his training. His instincts took over, and he tugged, haplessly, at her wrists. He couldn’t be sure if the darkness clouding his vision was asphyxiation or the night, falling from the sky.

“_Lee_!”

Tenten’s cry seemed pinched, but everything did, then: the suburbs around him were crammed into pinholes, their contours blurring and shifting as Lee pried at Temari’s hands. He couldn’t hear his heartbeat, but he could hear his knees knocking against one another, and it was rhythm enough for both of them: Tenten bounded between the beats, slamming all her weight into Temari’s back to loosen her hold. It was the cue Lee needed to bring his knee up, hard and decisive, squeezing his eyes shut to ignore the crunch of Temari’s bones beneath the blow.

“You _idioth_!” she yelped around her fangs – at least three of which were broken, slivers of old white bone gleaming through a fresh spray of inky, dead blood. She moved slow and deadly as a vulture as she moved to regain her footing, and Lee felt the air around him grow cold and heavy as the ocean as he awkwardly mirrored her movements.

“Temari,” he pleaded, voice skating shakily over breath he hadn’t quite recovered, “you don’t have to . . . we can—”

Temari lunged – but not at him. Tenten had been breathing heavily, rocking back on her heels to assess the situation. She could have been knocked over with a feather; with all of Temari’s strength barrelling freight-train style into her core, she dropped like a sack of grain. The cry to tumble from his lips was strangled beyond that recent chokehold as Lee watched Temari lunge for Tenten’s neck.

“Hah!” Tenten had fallen into the shadows once more, but this time, she moved faster than the dark did. Poised as she was above Tenten’s throat, Temari received a mouthful of fist for her efforts, and Tenten was a blur of gold skin and old flannel as she wrenched her hand inside the vampire’s mouth. The crunch of breaking bone was sickening, but Lee vowed to swallow it down like a pro, coming wordlessly to hover by Tenten’s side. Temari had vanished into the night before he even reached her.

“Gods,” he whispered. It was all he could think to say. “Tenten, you . . . oh, no. Oh _gods_.”

“What is it?” Her dark eyes were wide, eyebrows a confused squiggle across her forehead. “Lee, are you all right?”

“Oh gods oh gods oh gods,” he whispered. Then, for good measure, “Oh_ gods_.”

By the time he’d found his breathing, the shock had set into his skin, sending it abuzz with million-volt shudders. His hand shook as he reached for Tenten’s, which hung limp by her side. Great gouges had been left in the heel of her left palm, her skin a ghastly tie-dye of red and black where her blood mixed with Temari’s, her skin stretched taut and thin where one of her fragile fangs had been left embedded in Tenten’s fist.

It was her turn to blanch. “Oh,” she breathed, “oh gods.”

“Give me your shirt,” said Lee. Tenten winced in pain as she shrugged the old flannel from her shoulders, but she complied, her only complaints coming in hisses and shallow breaths. Lee swallowed hard once more, ripping a strip of fabric from the sleeve to tie around Tenten’s arm, just above the elbow.

Her eyes had been wide before, but now, they were great black holes, charred marks on her ashen face. “You don’t think it . . . ” she began. Lee shook his head adamantly. He couldn’t _“think it.”_ He couldn’t think anything at all. All he could do was to clutch at the makeshift tourniquet like it was a rope he hung from, and whisper a thousand rushed prayers. Everyone knew the RIP was a blood-borne disease: that mixing sick, dead blood with a human’s own was a three-letter promise of a fate worse than death.

_ Life in the nineties, _thought Lee, absurdly. The voice to spill from his heavy tongue was a foreign one: it was terse and whisper-tight, his words pressed awkwardly together as his throat filled with a sob. “Keep it below your heart at all times,” he ordered Tenten, parroting words he’d scarcely thought of since either of them became full-fledged Slayers. She nodded, more in response than assent: a signal to show she was still with him.

The movement was weak and pathetic, and it gave Lee pause. Tenten was neither. She was the strongest person he knew, after all: there was fire in her voice, and her limbs were brimstone; lightning ran through her veins as she whirled and fought off all the odds stacked against her.

But there was something else in her veins, too, Lee knew. Something new and dark and toxic, something they’d both dedicated their lives to stamping out, before it turned the world into monsters.

Lee didn’t know where it came from, but suddenly, he felt his heartbeat still: felt a throttling rage stretch icy fingers through his system, seeping into the honeycomb cracks of his bones like liquid nitrogen. Any sharp movements would have shattered them – shattered him. “You’re going to be all right,” he told Tenten, feeling as though he were reading off a teleprompter. She met his gaze warily.

“Will _he_?”

Somewhere deep in the sea of grass beyond them, Lee knew a tiny cottage sat, bracing uneasily against the woods as they struggled to life. Somewhere deep inside _it _was a man he’d hoped carried the spring with him, and who seemed dead and icy as the winter did, his image in Lee’s mind insubstantial and frosty.

“We need to talk to him” was all he said, and pretended not to hear Tenten swear in annoyance. Even as he kicked at the pavement, ducking from her wavering gaze, the harsh words echoed in the gnawing cavern of his core. It was, after all, a sentiment he could hardly help but share. Gaara might have wanted to be done with him, but Lee knew _that_ was a long way off.

“Gaara! Come on, dude, open up!”

“Oh, that’ll work,” muttered Tenten, not unkindly. “Banging on his door and yelling. It’s a time-honoured tradition, that.”

Lee ignored her. The warped glass of the windowpanes jumped and shuddered as he brought his fists down on the door, over and over, and the rusty hinges groaned in protest with his every motion. The wood of the door had fought back, at first, biting at the flesh of his hands with scores of splinters – but Lee had ignored them, too. “Gaara!” he cried, once more. “Gaara, it’s important!”

High above the little house, and their twin hunched figures, the sky was uncertain: patches of velvety darkness stretched in a messy quilt between wisps of promising silver clouds. As the moonlight washed over him, catching on the doodles littering his sneakers, Lee was struck by the clarity of the air: by the sudden break in Kurama’s horror-movie pattern of dark and stormy nights. The monochrome of the thin, sharp shadows them was palatial and calm, and Lee felt its chill seep into his limbs as he pounded away at the door, draining the colour from his skin.

“Please, Gaara,” he tried again. “Please.”

When the door did creak open, Lee nearly stumbled into it, and he felt his pulse catch on his ribs as he toppled forward. It was all he could do not to yelp in surprise as his gaze was filled by a pair of large black boots, a stocky shadow looming over the threshold.

“Kankuro,” began Lee, “we need—”

“What do you want?” Kankuro cut him off, crossing his arms. Lee thinned his lips.

“Our business is with Gaara, not you,” he snapped, terser than he’d meant to be. His apology withered on his tongue as Kankuro scowled.

“Gaara concerns me.”

“Gaara _concerns_ us too,” Tenten sniffed, from her perch below the doorstep. “As he does every Slayer this side of the Rockies.”

Kankuro’s retort was written deep in the lines of his face: in the half-moon shadows below his dull eyes and in the grim slash of his frown. It was static and unspoken, and it died quickly, fading into his old fatigue as Gaara materialised next to him. Next to his brother, glum and kind of cow-eyed, Lee couldn’t help but feel that Gaara seemed sharper than usual: his eyes were flinty and narrow, his features a mishmash of shattered glass in a pale array of wintry colours.

“It’s all right, Kankuro,” he said, softly. “I’ll deal with the rabble.”

“‘Rabble?’” Though Lee knew it was counterintuitive, he couldn’t help but bristle, and he felt his skin pebble against the stake he’d wedged back into his pocket. “Is _that_ what we are to you, Gaara?” _Is that what _I_ am? _Suddenly, the splinter wounds in his hands stung and burned.

Gaara blinked, slowly, and though his lashes were thin and pale, they cast long shadows over the angles of his face. He wasn’t quite frail in the dim – though the darkness hugged his willowy frame tightly, re-inking the contours of his bones in great blocky shapes – but he was far from solid; he swayed lightly on his feet, letting the wind move his body as it toyed with the curls across his brow. (There was a part of Lee that wanted to brush that stray hair aside. He clenched his fists shut, and hoped it would not slip out.)

“You know,” he said, at last, “I’ve been doing some thinking.”

Tenten scoffed, laying her non-wounded hand protectively on Lee’s shoulder. “I didn’t think you knew how,” she sneered. Gaara paid her little heed, his gaze never quite leaving Lee’s. Somewhere beneath his icy demeanour was something cagey and scared, but Gaara had pushed it deep: deep enough to drown under his watery blue eyes.

“The Uzushio have a saying,” Gaara went on, crossing his arms. “They reckon the earth has a long memory. After all, it’s been here for at least as long as I have – it can remember over a century of my life that was just fine without a Slayer mucking around in it.” He spat the term like a slur, with all the venom Lee knew was stored behind his lips – which, a rebellious part of his mind remembered, were soft. (Like, really soft.)

That was the part of him to speak up, voice hot and insistent against cold, clammy skin. “‘Just fine,’ huh?” he wanted to know. “Is that enough?”

“I’ve made my peace with my lot in life, Lee. Accepted it.”

“Don’t you want to _love_ it?” Lee spread helpless hands, and he heard desperation and anger race through his flimsy words like a forest fire. But Gaara was icy as ever, and those burning words went up in steam before they seemed to reach him. Lee dug deep as he fumbled for a new tact. “You know what else the Uzushio say?” he demanded of Gaara, taking a tiny step closer. Crammed together on the doorstep, Lee could feel Gaara’s breath dance on his nose. “They say Naruto Uzumaki, of 25-30 A, rez road, is _dead_. They say his head and body are in two different Ziploc bags down at the morgue. They say—”

Gaara’s hand shot out like a viper, veins, dead though they were, twitching beneath his skin as he shoved Lee from the doorstep. “Shut up,” he whispered. “Shut _up_!”

The door slammed shut with a thunderclap behind him, with a clap that echoed through the valley, flattening the wild grasses like a storm front. A thin slick of tears had been welling in Gaara’s eyes, and they glittered dangerously as the shock carried through them, threatening to spill at any moment. “Shut up,” he snapped, one last time. “And leave me alone, won’t you, Lee? I mean . . . oh, gods _almighty_! What part of ‘this was a mistake’ couldn’t you understand?”

“The part where you won’t let me in!” cried Lee. The wail had formed on his lips before he knew what he was saying – before he could stop himself. Lee watched a single tear struggle from Gaara’s lashes, tracing a shimmering line across his chalky skin. “Gaara,” Lee breathed, “please. Let me—”

“You say ‘let’ a lot for someone who hasn’t got any intentions to let _me_ decide, huh?” This time, when Gaara reached out to shove him, Lee felt the blow deep in his sternum: it was hard enough to bruise. “Here’s what I’ll let you do,” he growled. “I’ll let you leave me alone. Leave me to my siblings – at least I know where I stand with them.”

“No, you don’t.” Once more, Lee spoke without thinking, the accusation flying from his lips like a badly aimed bullet. If that were the case, Gaara might have been shell-shocked: his eyes went wide, before narrowing into icy slits, his lips parting over unspoken words. Whatever protests he had dissipated as Lee jammed an accusing finger toward him, his voice deadly-soft. “You don’t,” he insisted again. “That . . . that chakra? That soul? That last vestige of humanity the three of you have been hackey-sacking around since eighteen-ninety-shit?” Lee threw his hands skyward, swallowing a bitter laugh before it strangled him – like Temari had tried to. “Well,” he choked out, at last, “well apparently, it’s got an expiration date!”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” demanded Gaara. If Lee had thought his anger dangerously soft, Gaara’s was the wind itself: it buffeted at his skin and hair with needling intent, filling the air between them with something invisible, if all too obviously dangerous. Lee pressed his lips together: there was no backing out now.

“It means you should open your eyes. See what your sister did to mine.”

Tenten was trained to move silently – every Slayer was. Still, Lee felt his heart sink a little further with her every noiseless step. She moved so slowly and surely she might very well have been standing still – some trick of the moonlight, sallow skin and tangled hair a mess of thickets and brambles. Only her trembling frown came as a reminder that she was, in fact, very much alive . . . that, and the mangled mess of her arm, her wrist purple and swollen beneath the tourniquet fighting in vain (_Or, _thought Lee, hating himself for it, _in vein_) against Temari’s diseased blood as it danced dangerously with her own.

“It isn’t the first time she’s done something like this, Gaara,” said Tenten, hissing through her pain. “That she’s been attacked, and backed into a corner.” Slowly – staggeringly – she explained how they’d first found his safe house following a local drunk, insisting he’d been set upon by some Southern belle with a vengeance. With her every word, Gaara seemed to retreat just a little further into his collar, and he blinked rapidly against a storm of tears raging in his eyes.

“It’s Hidan,” he said. “It has to be. Temari said she . . . that she’d take matters into her own hands.”

He was silent, for a long time, and Lee felt it was as though the spring ground to a halt with him: that winter flooded the field as Gaara searched for the words, and that the trees did not stand straight again until he did. When he spoke at last, his voice was dry. Dead.

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” he asked. “That he’d divide and conquer. That she’d get hurt just trying to protect us.”

“And now it’s _our_ turn to protect you,” Lee said, simply. “Come on, Gaara. Let’s work together.” He didn’t say _“again.”_ He didn’t have to. Lee could feel his long lashes fluttering at his browbones, and his lips rolled into a pout he otherwise might have saved for funerals – but when he reached a hand out to Gaara, he slapped it away.

“Lead the way, Tenten,” he mumbled. “And let me see that wrist. Maybe I can help.”

_ Gaara and his maybes, _thought Lee. None of them spoke a word as they worked their way back to the apartment.

By the time they’d reached the creaky front door, though, and Lee had fished his keys from his pocket, the silence had shattered like an eggshell, dripping something cold and foreign in the cracks between them. Tears were flowing freely down Tenten’s cheeks, cutting thin streaks through a crust of dirt and dried blood. Gaara’s, on the other hand, had dried up, his eyes flat and cold as he watched Lee fumble with the lock. “I’ll just be a second—” he tried to explain, but Gaara cut him off.

“We don’t have a ‘second!’” he snarled, kicking at the laminate floor. “She was bitten! Come on, keep _up_! Aren’t you the high and mighty vampire Slayer?”

_ “Vampire Slayer! Vampire Slayer! Vampire . . .”_

Gaara’s words leapt like the wind once more, their echo howling from the plaster walls of the walkup, whipping into a tornado frenzy as they bounced off the steps. When the door wrenched open, banging off the wall, Lee could almost believe Gaara’s flaring anger had been the force to push it, and he felt it leap in static shocks across his tense limbs.

“Keep your voice down, Funshine Bear,” rasped Tenten.

But the damage was done. As the doorway loomed over them, the shadows of the apartment rushing to meet the fluorescent light of the stairwell, Lee could see each horrified face as though they’d been carved into stone. There was Gai, his brows knit heavy in concern as he blinked; there was Neji, the reflection of the scene flickering like a storm cloud in his wide silver eyes. Kakashi’s fork clattered to his plate as his hands went slack, and his jaw was slacker still, mouth a perfect _“O”_ of surprise. But none of it had anything on—

“Did you say ‘vampire?’”

Later, Neji would explain that they’d bumped into Sakura at the general store, and that Gai – overcome with sympathy for all she’d been through this spring – had invited her over for dinner and board games. Later, there would be a part of Lee that found the gesture sweet. But as it was now, Lee could only watch the horror dawn in Sakura’s eyes – watch it flicker and wane like the Northern Lights as she mouthed the words over and over again, putting together some terrible, twisted jigsaw puzzle.

“‘Vampire,’” she whispered, once more. And though Lee hated to pay such superstitions much mind, he couldn’t help but wrench his gaze from his shell-shocked friends to the window, where the moon was high and full.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i’m so sorry this chapter was so delayed everyone. i've really been going through it lately and writing’s been a struggle . . .   
but going back and reading the lovely comments and messages you've all left me so far with this fic has made life so much brighter (ha! title reference). anyways seriously thank you all so much, youre lit rally gorjus luvs x 
> 
> PS: check out the [gaalee holiday exchange!](https://gaaleegaaholidayexchange.tumblr.com/post/188357512659/sign-ups-for-the-gaalee-leegaa-holiday-exchange) this fandom has been so welcoming to me this year and i’m so excited to get to give back. hope you all sign up!


	10. Fuel

A starless night had been rolled across the city streets, neat and black as the asphalt below, and heavy in the kind of way that made Lee feel as though the darkness did not stop at the horizon. Rather, it stretched a gauzy, funereal veil over everything and everyone beneath it; Lee found he was no exception. His reflection was bright as it – as he – stared the window down, the whites of his eyes and of old scars jarring against his skin, cool and dark as the midnight outside.

A grinding down below heralded a motorcycle passing through, and even in the traces of its headlights, Lee saw new hollows beneath his bones, and new bruises along his knuckles and wrists. If he imagined his skin like the night sky outside, his wounds and fatigue bore down on it like the groaning engine of that bike.

But the leaking bottle of isopropyl stung at his dry fingers more painfully still, and the stark contrast of the white cotton bandages against his skin was sharper than any ghostly reflection. Gathering the last of their next-door neighbour’s first-aid kit tighter in his arms, Lee shook the thoughts from his head, and stomped the final stretch to their only bathroom.

The tiny room was barely equipped to handle one person – with three humans and one vampire wadded into its dusty corners, Lee imagined the bathroom straining at its tiled seams (especially as he edged in to add a fourth human to that tally). Neji’s knees bumped against the sides of the claw-foot tub as he restlessly bounced his leg up and down, and he’d knocked down the soap dish as he moved to take Tenten’s hand. To take Tenten’s_ good_ hand. The wounded mess of her left lay flat and unmoving on the edge of the sink, and in the dim yellow light, Lee could see her eyes glitter as she leta frowning Gaara poke and prod at the gashes along her knuckles . . .

. . . but it was Sakura Haruno who spoke up as Lee closed the door behind him. “Took you long enough,” she muttered, reaching to take the rubbing alcohol from Lee’s arms. “The last thing she needs is for this . . . this _bite_ to get infected.” Though she moved with the same practiced, athletic grace any of them did, it was an ill-fitting restraint on her arms and her shaking hands. The isopropyl poured messily from the bottle, and even above the hum of the lamp and the whine of the radiator, Lee could hear Tenten hiss in pain as it splashed across her mangled hand.

“Let me,” said Lee softly, as Sakura reached for a pair of tweezers and a lighter. He watched his reflection tremble in her wide green eyes – but he was steadier than she was, shivering as she kicked at the floor. The last thing Lee could think to do, just then, was to trust Sakura around an open flame and a bottle of rubbing alcohol, even if they were just being used to sterilise their makeshift ER.

This time, her only answer was a noncommittal grunt, and her lips were a thin line as she moved back to the _“operating table.”_

Lee knew that if he asked Tenten, she’d say that the bite looked worse than it was: that the light caught on the lymph seeping from the fang marks, marbling what was just torn skin into some slasher-film closeup. But any promises she made were slurred and slow, and Lee was Slayer enough to know it was bullshit. The brave face she put on was really only for her own benefit. The rest of the apartment was a twisted coterie of drawn faces and somber tones, slumped postures crammed in by the walls as they crept ever inward. Even Neji, the patron saint of keeping cool under pressure, was seething. In fact, he’d reacted stronger than even Gai, slamming doors and cursing under his breath. His blindness wasn’t the only reason that Sakura was the one operating on Tenten: he was shaking far too violently to be trusted around a scalpel, whether or not he could see it.

“Describe the wound again?” he croaked, straightening against the back of the tub. Lee thinned his lips as Sakura rattled off her clipped, clinical chronicle, and winced with every dirty look she shot him:

“ . . . bruising under the tourniquet,” she was saying, with a furious glare, “which some _amateur _must have tied.”

“It was a smart move.” Gaara’s voice was more sobering than any baleful stare. It cut like a razor wind through the fog around Lee’s mind, dragging cold fingers down his spine until he straightened. “Lee— uh, well, they both acted well under pressure – er, considering.” His words knocked like falling dominoes against each other as he forced them out, his gaze never leaving the bathroom floor. “The most important thing to do is to keep healthy and infected blood from mingling. It was smart,” he said again. For the splittest of seconds, Gaara’s gaze flicked upward to meet his, and Lee was shocked to find his pale blue eyes glittering like frost. Then he schooled his features, and any vulnerability was gone.

“He has a point.” Neji took a shuddering breath. “The RIP isn’t like snake venom, Sakura. It moves through the bloodstream, not the lymphatic system. Even risking limb or nerve damage with a tourniquet is safer than risking the infected blood reaching the heart. Lee . . . Lee did the best he could.”

Lee’s own blood was running colder than even Tenten’s, which was slick and dark against the pallor clinging, burr-like, to her arm. _“I’m sorry,”_ he longed to tell her. _Sorry for letting you get hurt. For getting you tangled up in my mess. For making this mess out of Gaara and his siblings in the first place._ But Lee’s breaths were shallow and strangled, the tension of the room far tighter a tourniquet, far stronger a noose, than any ripped-up flannel shirt. In the end, all he could do was sink to the floor, and lay a hand on Tenten’s knee. She gave him a wobbly smile.

“I’ll be fine,” she whispered. “We’ll make it through this, okay, Lee?”

Lee cleared his throat. “We start by taking the fang out, right?”

Somewhere above him, Neji was guiding Sakura through the pathology of a vampire bite, and her voice ran watery with tears and rubbing alcohol alike as she tended to Tenten’s hand: a cut here, a pull there, a muttered curse over yonder, as Temari’s broken tooth was wrenched free from a vein. Every time he blinked, Lee was met by a wall of red. It felt like the world’s most mocking Hallmark card: resplendent in reds and glittering tears to celebrate the three-letter death sentence they were trying to bleed from Tenten’s hand.

Those same three letters – that same mysterious pathogen – hovered, Lee knew, just as uneasily under Gaara’s thin skin. When Lee shifted on his haunches, he brushed against Gaara’s leg, and he felt his heart lurch.

“You should get some air.”

This time, when Gaara spoke, Lee did not start – not because he wasn’t shocked, but because there were only so many gasps he could take, so many beats one heart could skip. “So should you,” he blurted out. “You look like hell.”

Gaara only sniffed. It was true – he did. His bloodless skin was sallow beneath the flickering yellow lamplight, and his gaze was darting and glassy, eyes silver behind a slick of tears and a rim of red. But he shook his head all the same. “No,” he muttered, “no, they might need me.”

“I really don’t.” Sakura spoke through gritted teeth as she wrenched the tap on in the bathtub. Rusty flecks tumbled from the faucet, and Lee didn’t exhale until the water ran clear again. “I’m just going to flush out the last of the, um, _infected _blood and then slowly loosen up the tourniquet. It’s a one-doctor job.”

“You aren’t a doctor,” mumbled Neji. Tenten rolled her eyes, rubbing at her bound left elbow.

“Neither are you, Backstreet Boy Scout,” she teased. Then her gaze hardened. “Now book it. Or _else_.”

The threat was as empty as her stare, but Lee brightened all the same. It was weak – a flickering candle to something that usually burned like the sun – but it was good to hear Tenten find some of her fire once more. This time, when she shot him a weary smile, Lee grinned back, so wide it hurt.

Still, the smile faded quickly, and the shadows shrouding the apartment crushed his posture inward as they seeped into his limbs. Muffled voices sounded from behind Gai’s closed bedroom door, bunching the heavy air up like darning. Gai had chosen to explain the Slayers’ shadow world to Kakashi himself, citing a week of board games and takeout dinners as his best bet to soften the blow of vampires’ existence. Lee felt a pang of sympathy rise in his chest for the poor agent. He’d been raised into the knowledge, after all: raised to fight the monsters under the other kids’ beds. He couldn’t imagine having such a bomb dropped on him thirty-odd years after the Council’s sell-by date.

“Do you want tea?”

Tea was the last thing Lee wanted. His mouth was already burning, breathing already short without boiling leaf juice scalding his throat. But he let Neji pour him a cup of something herbal and bitter-smelling anyway, and scooped him into a one-armed hug as they wandered to the kitchen table.

“I’ll fix us something to eat,” Lee was saying, twisting to call over his shoulder. “Did you get milk, by the way?”

Any answer Neji gave was interrupted by a sudden scraping sound: someone clearing their throat, halfway to a death rattle. When Gaara did speak, his voice was barely a whisper: some undead rattle at the base of his long, scarred neck. “Do y’all, ah,” he began, kicking at the floor, “do . . . could I help with anything?”

“He talks again!” Neji burst out, spitting venom from beneath his resting sneer. “Over your whole _Phantom of the Soap Opera_ schtick, now, are you?” He had a napkin in his hand, and he wadded it up for the express purpose of throwing it angrily across the room. Lee had barely opened his mouth to protest before Gaara jerked backward, jamming his hands into the crooks of his elbows.

“Fine,” he muttered. “Fine! I’ll leave.”

“Oh, _don’t_.”

Lee let the door slam shut behind him as he stalked after Gaara, but he didn’t get a reaction. The only answer to come meet him was his own voice, echoing off the walls, rattling in the thin space between the uneven plaster and the tension in the air. The hallway was sweltering, air thicker than the summer had ever promised. It felt like their building – that shitty walkup, out of every condo on the West Coast – had managed to stretch itself that much closer to the unseen sun; it burned in the scorn of the stars, high and mighty behind their cover of clouds. Though the humidity made his joints ache and hair rebel, Lee wished the sky would break. Lee wished for a _storm_. A real one: not some dinky little drizzle, but thunder and lightning, and winds that would blast it all clean.

But the ceiling was firm plaster above him, and even the leakiest of air conditioners didn’t a storm cloud make. So Lee could only try again. He sank down against the wall beside Gaara, stretching his legs out across the landing. He could just wedge his feet through the gaps in the baluster, and swung his legs absentmindedly out over the stairwell, almost weightless.

Hesitantly, Gaara did the same. His shoulders had shot up to his ears, and the mop of his hair cast long shadows across his chalky skin as his gaze fell to the stairs below. Lee’s hands were limp by his sides, and for a moment, he thought of reaching out: of linking their pinkies, of placing a comforting hand on Gaara’s back. But he sat on his hands instead, and he didn’t look up when he finally spoke again. “Thank you for coming with us,” Lee mumbled.

“I thought she might need help—”

“Just accept the thanks.”

Gaara was silent for a long moment, and Lee could almost imagine his make-believe storm churning above them once more; sadness and shock were whirling in equal measure behind his glassy eyes. “It’s good she’ll be all right,” sighed Gaara, at last. “Tenten, I mean.”

“Temari will be, too.” Lee didn’t know if he believed it – but he had to at least_ mean_ it. There was a smile to go with the half-truth, closemouthed and tight. If he saw it in the mirror, Lee knew his gaze would be downcast, darting. It had become a routine in months past – since Isobu, and since Rin Nohara – and the muscle memory of the motion was more reassuring than that weak smile ever could be.

Gaara kicked, halfheartedly, at the stiff air below them. He was swaying slightly on his perch, and Lee had to fight the urge to steady him once more. “You can’t know that,” he protested. Lee shrugged.

“If you need her to be,” he said, softly, “she will be.”

Gaara was quick to the cue, his voice dry. “You can’t know that, either.”

There was a part of Lee that felt he could – if for no other reason than he’d once had to believe it himself: than he’d once had to desperately hope that Gaara would be strong enough for the both of them when they’d been in danger. But that felt a lifetime ago, now, and the space between them was dead and cold. It was Lee’s turn to sigh. “Fine,” he resolved, “I can’t. But we can make _sure_ she is. We can go out and canvas the town, and bring her back here, and get some food in her before she goes all Rambo again.” The words fell as haphazardly as the rain, and the dead pauses between his halting sentences roared like thunder. Suddenly, Lee regretted wishing for a storm. “We can _make sure_,” he said again – this time, with all the wind’s intent. “We can _do_ something, instead of just waiting.”

Gaara scowled on instinct, and his lifeless frown was a weak wall against the creeping sadness worrying at his brow; his eyes shone with disdain and wonder in equal measure. When he found his voice, it was a messy patchwork of emotion: there was a startled laugh here and a weak hiccup there, until his sentences rose as awkward as a Bauhaus building. “Why do you bother, Lee?” he finally managed. “Why stick around me when . . . when all you wind up getting is hurt?”

Though barely ten feet spanned the space between his feet and the ground floor, Lee suddenly felt as though he sat on the edge of a dangerous precipice: the linoleum Grand Canyon. _“Because,” _he wanted to say. He wished it were so simple: that seven simple letters could contain all his hope and longing and the fact that they kissed once – that it could be just as loaded as the names of the shades darkening their everyday lives. But neither life nor undeath were so simple. Lee could only frown. “Because no matter what happens between us, this is our fight,” he told Gaara, at last. “And we owe it to each other to be in it ’til the end.”

The silence to follow his words howled with all the fury of a cyclone – or, Lee recalled, like a banshee. He’d fought one in Oto a few years ago, and Tenten had been fined for loitering as she tried to come to his aid. Another time in Kiri, the Neighbourhood Watch had come cracking down on them when they’d staked a vamp colony in a Girl Scout rec centre. Lee’s past was studded with scrapes and misdemeanours, and when he closed his eyes, he could imagine it stretching like a road map behind him: childhood innocence and muddled trauma landmarks between the cramped lines of state borders. He wondered what Gaara’s map looked like – if there were any breaks to an interstate of dread and waiting.

The air was heavy around them, and it buffeted against Lee like a tarp as Gaara shifted, inching his hand ever so slightly toward Lee’s. For a moment, their fingers brushed, and Lee felt a storm cloud’s worth of static leap up his arm, heart hammering in shock – but then Gaara pulled away, folding his arms once more. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.“For . . . I mean, I’m . . . I’m just scared.”

“We all are—”

“You aren’t. You’re never scared,” Gaara protested, straightening. “You’re always brave. And kind. And just . . . shucks, you’re just a good guy. Through and through.”

Lee – with blood on his hands and a million bruises – wasn’t sure how true the statement was. But he sat up alongside Gaara all the same, and he forced a smile, holding it until Gaara matched it with a watery grin of his own. They were still deep in uncharted territory, the road maps of their pasts as useless as they were winding. Still, when Gaara let himself deflate, brushing his hand to Lee’s once more, Lee thought maybe – just maybe – they were en route to brighter tidings.

They found Kankuro where they’d left him, holding solitary court in that run-down little cottage. Half a Pop-Tart and fifty cents had drawn him from the safety of his armchair to the doorstep, and with the other half of the Pop-Tart, Gaara had managed to get him to stop hyperventilating when they’d explained Temari was in trouble. Even then, though, Kankuro’s dark eyes had gone wide, and his words had come in chattering bursts as he’d hared down the streets of Kurama in his coat and tails.

“Temari!” he cried. “Temari, where are you?”

“Hush up!” Gaara hadn’t fully retreated into an icy shell, but he’d begun building his walls up again, and his gaze was cold. “You’ll wake half the town – and everyone on her tail, besides.”

Lee shot him a warning look. Gaara hadn’t exactly reacted calmly to the situation, either, muttering and spitting and brooding like his undeath depended on it. But as his gaze wandered to Kankuro, who’d cut welts into his pasty skin as he wrung his hands, and whose crumb-covered knees knocked together as he walked, any semblance of annoyance in him faded into defeat. All the hand-holding and road-tripping in the United States hadn’t really changed poor Gaara’s situation – he was still caught in that impossible war against his maker, against his own nature – and Lee doubted kissing Kankuro would do any of them much good. Still, it felt wrong to sink into that defeat.

“Chin up,” Lee whispered to Kankuro, after a beat. Gaara had begun stalking ahead of them, and Lee felt tolerably certain it meant he wouldn’t catch any scorn for placing a hand on Kankuro’s shoulder. “She’ll be all right. And then we can all . . . I don’t know, have hot chocolate, or something.” Under Gai’s roof, that tended to mean vaguely brown protein shakes chucked in the microwave, but it was the thought that counted. Still, Kankuro only shook his head.

“I never thought we should come here,” he muttered. “Thought it was stupid as all get-out. But my siblings had to get all bleeding-heart over Hidan’s new prospects. Like we could save ’em.”

“And now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . . ” Lee craned his neck to watch Gaara turn a corner, and shivered, slightly, as they passed the picket fences he and Tenten had fought Temari by earlier that night. “I mean,” he tried again, “after everything that’s happened, do you still think you should’ve stayed away?”

Kankuro was blunt. “Yes,” he said. “Things were a lot simpler before we got tangled up with you lot.” Lee had barely opened his mouth to protest before Kankuro fixed him with a withering glare, and placed his hands on his hips. “A lot simpler,” he pressed, “before my brother had to go and get all gooey over _you_.”

“Everything all right back there?”

There was a touch of exasperation to Gaara’s voice, but it came to Lee as dust in the wind: thin and inadmissible, once one realised how harmless it was. When they passed into the friendly glow of a streetlamp, Lee thought he could see Gaara smiling, eyes crinkling with a warmth Lee had feared he’d lost for good two states and a kiss ago.

“Right as rain,” he called. Kankuro rolled his eyes.

“_Gooey_,” he mouthed. Then he straightened. “Temari-i-i!

His cry didn’t quite echo down the street so much as it tumbled: awkward, worn-out consonants knocking against one another like a child’s block tower falling in on itself. Kankuro didn’t seem weary the same way Gaara did – he didn’t seem to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders so much as he seemed to drag it haphazardly behind him. A pang of empathy flared in Lee’s chest. Even beneath layers of Splenda and Spandex, he was tired, too.

Still, tired or not, Lee was alive – and it was more than he could say for the voice that came scrabbling back to meet theirs. “I’m – _kff! kff! _– I’m here!”

“_Temari_!”

Though Gaara and Kankuro raced like bullets down the street, Lee was the first to reach Temari, blood roaring in his ears. He’d dug his heels into the pavement to ease his stop, but it had come quickly back to hit him – literally. Lee felt the force of his own speed ram into his back, forcing him over; his knees creaked in protest. Somehow, even huddled in her lacy underthings and a hand-me-down hoodie, Temari looked imperious.

“You’re still around, then?” she asked. Lee folded his arms.

“I will be for a while.”

It wasn’t long before Gaara and Kankuro caught up to the two of them, and Temari was scooped (rather unceremoniously) into a messy group hug, Kankuro’s arms tight around her shoulders and Gaara’s. Any other night, a scene like the one before him might have been picture-perfect, Lee supposed. In the haze of the spring and the streetlights, the three of them were a mosaic of smiles and bright blue eyes, set primly between picket fences and tidy trashcans. But the veneer was thin to Lee, as he hovered awkwardly before them. Gaara flinched away from his brother’s touch, and his gaze was hapless as it wandered across his sister. Temari’s mouth was smeared with blood, and when she mustered up a toothy grin, weakly elbowing Kankuro in the side, Lee could see that her fangs hadn’t fully retracted: rather, a jagged row of broken teeth was wedged behind her smile.

She shifted, slightly. It was a move Lee recognised almost without realising it. She was moving weight off a tired joint. Off an ankle he might have made her sprain, Lee remembered, as he flashed back to their half-fight just hours earlier. But that was all it was – a flashback. The memory had barely bobbed to the surface before a riptide pushed it to something deeper: before Gaara turned sad, watery eyes on him, and Lee felt his breath catch in his throat. This time, the urge to reach out was so overpowering Lee wound up jamming his hands in his pockets.

“What happened, Temari?” he asked – more to fill the silence than anything else. Her gaze was flinty, and Lee couldn’t blame her: there wasn’t much more to say beyond what they’d already knew. That she’d gone looking for trouble, and found it. That she’d lost.

But Gaara’s lips were pursed in a careful pout, face drawn, as though it could keep him from breaking altogether. Neither Lee’s real questions nor Temari’s unspoken scorn had reached him, and so she sighed, breaking the spell.

“Look,” she spat, “it happens sometimes, all right? I . . . Hidan, he’s got my number, but not yours. They’ll show up sometimes. Rough me around.” Lee’s heart lurched once more as Temari pulled away from her siblings to stare them down. How many times hadn’t he convinced himself to do the same? To call the danger to himself, rather than it falling on Tenten or Neji? He’d met Gaara and his family when stalking off on his own, after Naruto’s death – and even before that, he’d brought the whole Isobu job crashing down on his own head by trying to assume a lead role he wasn’t cut out for.

“Why?” Gaara’s voice was plaintive, and he looked around desperately for support – though his gaze skipped over Lee twice as he turned from an indignant Temari to a grim Kankuro over and over again. “Why didn’t you tell us he . . . that he’d been . . . _agh_!” He threw his hands to the sky. “Gods almighty, Temari, why would you let yourself be his punching bag? That doesn’t keep _anyone_ safe!”

The dew gleamed like a thousand beetles’ wings in the streetlamps’ glow, and buzzed as insistently as the tension shepherded it skyward – only to fly as quickly away as Gaara’s cry careened down the suburb street. That haunted sadness hadn’t dissipated from his features. Instead, desperation pulled it to awful angles, and it raged in his eyes, wide and bloodshot (or, as bloodshot as they might ever be). And then his gaze finally met Lee’s: raw and painful and somehow, through it all, as wide-eyed and hopelessly young as he’d seemed on that rooftop in Suna.

Lee found himself speaking without realising it. “You’re right,” he breathed. Then once more: “You’re right, Gaara. Nobody is safe, not right now.”

“That’s a cheery thought—” Kankuro began, but Lee cut him off, raising his fist.

“Not now,” he said once more. “And there’s only one way to make sure we are – to make sure we put an end to all this.” His voice had reached a fever pitch, and his knuckles were white. When Lee finally mustered up a smile, it was grim – but he held it all the same. “We have to take the fight to them, you guys. We’re going to find Hidan.”

“Oh, as _if_ we’re going to find Hidan.”

There was a tiny trio of candles on the kitchen table: shabby tea lights in wrinkled foil holders, a far cry from the elegant silver candlesticks Neji would have them set out for Shabbat. Lee welcomed the change. He could lean over these, running his fingers back and forth through the flames. He lingered, for a moment, as Tenten’s words flickered through their ghostly light, and winced when the fire leapt back to bite at his fingertips.

“It’s a small town,” he protested. “Practically nowhere to hide.”

“Not that small! Remember how long it took us—” Suddenly, Tenten stiffened, lowering her voice to barely a whisper. “Remember how long it took us to figure out Sasuke the crack dealer and Sasuke the vampire were the same dude?” The argument came out rushed and flat, and Tenten pushed it forward like the last bit of toothpaste she just wanted_ out_. “It’s a bad idea,” she finally huffed, raising her voice once more. “We should stay put.”

“And then what?”

The living room was packed from wall to wall with strays – a veritable PFLAG chapter in and of itself; the sofa bed made a lumpy throne room as Gaara’s siblings jostled to and fro and as Neji rifled through tome and tome. But he wasn’t the one holding court. Neither were Gai and Kakashi, sitting stiffly to the side. It was Sakura whose voice rang high and clear through the room, and her gaze that threatened to freeze the blood pooling in Lee’s fingertips. In the dim candlelight, her face was grim as a statue’s, features flat and stony.

“We ‘stay put,’” she echoed. “And _then what_? We just wait for someone to get . . . to get attacked again, or for another surprise visit from a friendly neighbourhood cop impersonator?” Her voice could have cracked the concrete, or the bricks outside, and Lee felt her every clipped word batter his chest. “Lee’s right,” she spat, and he hated to hear it. “We need to_ do_ something.”

“_You_ aren’t doing anything.” Gai spoke gravely, and for a moment – Lee counted: four, six, eight – all sixteen eyes in the room were on him, and the injuries Slaying had left him. But Sakura tore her gaze away violently, tossing her pink-dyed hair as though it were a road flare. Anything else Gai was saying seemed to wither on the vine, and Sakura’s glare was blazing.

“He’s right. You don’t want to be a Slayer, Sakura.” Lee spoke with conviction, if not certainty. Gaara was the second out of all of them to look up, then, and Lee wondered if his eyes would still be so glittery if he hadn’t been backed by candlelight. Suddenly, Lee’s mouth was dry; his lips cracking along a thousand new lines. “Sakura,” he said again, repeating her name like a mantra, “it’s . . . it’s dangerous. There are moments out there when you think you’re gonna _die_—”

“—and moments you’ll wish you _were_ dead,” Neji cut in. His hands were still shaking, and Lee couldn’t help but notice he’d been turning the same page back and forth for at least the past three minutes. Tersely – as though she was worried someone might see – Tenten flitted to his side, placing a warning hand on his shoulder. Sakura only scowled.

“Two can . . . well, four . . . _whatever_. We can _all_ play that game,” she finally scoffed. “Keep me out, I’ll do the same. I suppose you don’t even care who Deidara Yamanaka is, do you?”

_He’s Ino’s cousin, _thought Lee. _Duh. _But when Tenten turned back toward him, her face was grim enough for him to know that somehow, it wasn’t true. So instead, Lee arched his eyebrows. “We only want to keep you all safe,” he told Sakura. “Enough of us have been hurt already—”

“—So let me fucking fight!”

Lee had been the one to press Gai into telling Sakura the whole truth, even the ugly bits: even the fact of why she was a target for Hidan and his Akatsuki. He’d thought she’d deserved to know, of course – but there had been a part of Lee that had hoped she’d be scared onto the sidelines. It was the sensible thing to be, he felt (having never, ever, _ever_ had any such sense knocked into him, himself). But Sakura wore the apparent death sentence as proudly as she did her hair dye and her cheer uniform, a welcome neon reminder of how to fight off the dark. If Lee hadn’t been terrified for her sake, he might have been in awe.

But he was, and so he wasn’t. Instead, Lee tried for one of his patented, got-it-under-control smiles. “Let’s all take five,” he hazarded. When nobody answered, Lee thought he’d try again: “Maybe we should—”

His heart sank as soon as he said it – not with his own defeatist words, but with their futility. The second he’d forced his shaky voice into a steadier timbre, he’d built a stage for a new chorus line of yelling. Faster than even he could follow, Lee watched the living room erupt into a symphony of snarls and sneers. They were hypocrites, Sakura insisted, for refusing to fight – or for wanting to fight, and not letting her in – they were idiots to Kakashi, for letting whatever _“all this”_ was spiderweb into a town-wide manhunt under their noses – they were reckless to Neji, they—

“_Order_!”

Lee _felt_ Gaara’s voice, rather than heard it: it sank deep into his bones, like the permafrost the spring had yet to shed, and his rasping consonants stretched like fibreglass through the fuzz of the air. “Order,” spat Gaara once more, crossing his arms. “Honest, trying to get a word in edgewise in here is like shuttlecocking with a hornets’ nest. Miss Sakura—” he turned to her with an icy frown “—what’s all this about Mr. Yamanaka?”

She shrugged, clearly irritated with the prospect of cashing in her chit so quickly. “He isn’t really Ino’s cousin, is all,” she muttered, tugging at the collar of her varsity jacket. “I did some digging when he first hijacked our lives, and . . . well, the only person in the state with that name is supposed to have died in forty years ago.” Slowly, she began to weave a grungy tapestry of a story. She and Ino had been roommates and fast friends during their first term at the local university, and when Ino had heard Sakura had no real family of her own – just a pair of foster parents she saw twice a year – she’d insisted Sakura come stay with her during the autumn holidays. But Ino’s parents had quickly developed a morbid interest in Sakura’s quote-en-quote _“superhuman” _strength and agility, and then – on a completely unrelated note – explained that Ino’s cousin would be moving to Kurama alongside them.

“I’m not stupid,” Sakura went on, kicking at the floor. “I knew somehow, this Deidara guy had something on the family. Her parents seemed to hate him, and . . . and Ino was miserable, once she got over being all confused. But I figured it was some blood money, mob shit. I poked around for Ino’s sake, really. And I didn’t really think _I_ had anything to do with it all until . . . ”

“Until Sasuke,” said Lee, voice grim. Sakura’s nod was more of a nervous spasm than anything else.

“Friends in low places,” Gaara mused. “You were in the wrong place at . . . well, I suppose any time would have been the wrong time, if Deidara really is so old.” Nobody laughed at the feeble joke, and Gaara cleared his throat, stiffly. “Thank you, Sakura,” he mumbled. “Agent Hatake, let’s hear your proposal for a course of action next . . . ”

Slowly but surely, Gaara coaxed a half-dozen sob stories into the open, herding the scattered grains of their complaints into tidy groups, as easily as a child might have built a sandcastle. And just like that sandcastle, the reality of their new situation – their new allies, and the new truths they had to accept – stretched across the living room in gentle slopes and winding moats, topography not nearly as threatening now that it had been tamed, or (this, Lee thought with half a smile, and he hid it behind his hand) that the big kids had declared the sandbox neutral territory.

When the chatter had finally died down, Lee found Gaara winding toward the fire escape, and he was hot on his heels. “Hey,” he called. “Wait up!”

With his back to him, Lee could only guess that the rise and fall of Gaara’s shoulders meant he was folding his arms (or crossing himself, or something). But when Gaara twisted his head around, Lee saw his eyes had crinkled up at the corners, a smile dancing awkwardly at the corners of his mouth. “What is it, Lee?” he asked. Worry and weariness flashed in quick succession across his features, and when he reached for that smile again, it hung limply from his pout. “More bellyaching? Town hall isn’t in session anymore.”

For a moment, Lee wasn’t quite sure what to say – if Gaara’s dry remark was another weak joke, and if he was supposed to laugh. If he was allowed to laugh, as the tension leached ever so slowly from the apartment. In the end, he only shrugged, wrenching the window open. “Mind if I join you out there?” he asked, instead. “I could use some air.”

“We were just outside.”

“Is that a ‘no?’”

Gaara deflated slowly: first his shoulders went down, and his chin bobbed lower, and he looked up at Lee through his lashes. They stood so close that Lee could see the fine shadows they cast over Gaara’s pale eyes, the sharp angles of his face softening in the moonlight. “No,” Gaara relented, at last. “Never.”

He was still, for a moment, and Lee hovered awkwardly behind him, trying desperately to figure out what the double negative might have meant. But then Gaara took Lee’s hand, to lead them out the window, and Lee felt his heart flutter where it had lodged in his throat.

The fire escape was as tiny as any, this side of town, and their knees knocked against each other as they untangled themselves from the window. Perhaps _“untangled” _was too strong a word: Gaara’s ankle had wound up looped behind Lee’s as he pried himself over the windowsill, and when Lee threw his hands forward, trying to keep them out of a fallen heap, he found himself taking Gaara down with them. They landed in a veritable knot of gangling limbs and messy hair, but even as Lee’s head slammed against the wrought-iron railing, he couldn’t keep himself from dissolving into laughter.

“Oh, Lee!” Genuine concern coloured Gaara’s voice – but only in the way chalk or aquarelle might have, faint and easily forgotten. His laughter was breathless, his movements carefree as he leaned back, helping Lee upright. “Golly,” he was going on, eyes skyward, “aren’t you supposed to be more coordinated than all that?”

“Slayer myth,” Lee decided. For a moment, he was content to leave it there: to watch Gaara reacquaint himself with the snaggletoothed smile he’d debuted on the road trip, to let the slow susurrus of their breathing fall into tandem with the wind as it whistled through the brownstones. But the wind halted at the corner of Church and Main, and when the streetlamps flickered on, Gaara jerked his hand back away.

Lee figured his best bet was a winning smile. “You killed it in there,” he told Gaara. “That’s, uh, that’s what I wanted to say. To you, out here, that is.” His tongue felt heavy as a cinderblock, and it was just as dry. “Seriously, though, you were amazing.” Was it still gushing if his mouth felt like sandpaper? _Oh, great,_ thought Lee, _now I’m thinking about Gushers._ It had been one thing to try to psych Gaara up before they went after Temari. But the last time they’d been alone like this, looking out over the stars, they’d kissed – and Gaara had left.

“I just . . . I just did what you would’ve.”

“Huh?”

Gaara’s expression was deadly serious, and his stare was hard. Lee rolled his lips, and backed ever so slightly into the railing behind him, suddenly desperate to give Gaara’s words a space they themselves had never quite known. “I just asked myself, ‘what would Lee say?’” Gaara explained, as though it were scripture.

Lee’s knuckles were white as he wrapped his fingers around the rusty rails behind him. “I did say stuff,” he reminded Gaara, staring at his feet. “It was all you.”

“It’s what you taught me,” Gaara insisted. “You . . . you made such a point of giving me all this attention whenever you thought I might need it, and . . . and in trying to see the best in me. I reckoned if you could help me stay afloat, it’d work with the others.”

“So you’re into the power of friendship now?” Lee fought hard to keep the venom from his voice (and the notion brought him all the way back to a motel room in hillbilly country a week ago, and of him begging Gaara to do the same). (Suddenly, Lee was all too aware of the drop below him, should the floor give out, as his heart was threatening to do.) (Lee’s hands were starting to get clammy.)

“Do I have to be sparking you up to want to be a better person?”

(So, super clammy.)

This time, Lee welcomed the edge to his words: they drove deeper into his own body than they would anyone else’s, he figured, and it was as good a cue as any to sit up straight. “You still like me, Gaara,” he stated, flatly. “I know you do.”

“Bully for you,” muttered Gaara. His gaze plummeted to the Dumpsters and litter below, and a mop of straggling curls crashed like a curtain over his maudlin features. Lee rolled his lips.

“And I like you, too,” he was babbling. “Like, a lot! And I know that kiss meant something, ’cause you only got all weird when I mentioned telling the others, and now you’re all, like, friends with them, and—”

Gaara’s lips were on his in an instant, his palms cold against the plains of Lee’s cheeks; he clutched at the nape of Lee’s neck like he wasn’t sure whether to hug him or strangle him. Perhaps it was a mixture of both. All Lee knew was to press back: to push their lips together, again and again. Even as their teeth knocked awkwardly together and his back slammed into the railing, Gaara was the only anchor he could think to cling to. Really, there was a part of Lee that barely registered it as a kiss. Rather, he felt as though they were locked in some kind of mission, some kind of quest – they were desperately, _hungrily_ seeking something impossible, locked away deep within each other.

But for all the unanswered questions Lee imagined in the smear of his chapstick, glistening at the corner of Gaara’s mouth, he was no stranger to being out of breath. His lungs were burning, and his heart was pounding; his hands were trembling as they settled on Gaara’s chest, pushing him gently away.

“Well?” Gaara’s eyes shone. “That’s what you wanted, right?”

“I. Uh. I mean, yes,” panted Lee. “I would – _hah _– very much like for us to, like, continue this. In the foreseeable future.” His breathing rattled in his chest, which felt too loose and too tight, all at once, and the frown he felt worrying at his (kinda sore) lips was one he saw mirrored on Gaara’s. “And you?” He hardly dared to ask it, but he’d never been one for filters, either. When Gaara scooched closer, Lee wasn’t sure if he actually wanted the embrace, or if he just wanted to hide whatever emotions were warring across his face.

“Desperately,” he finally answered. Lee could feel his lips shape the word as Gaara turned his head into the crook of Lee’s neck. “But it isn’t the right time, and there’s so much going on, and . . . ”

“But you want to make something of this.” This time, it was Gaara’s turn to stumble in his seat, and Lee could only think to gather him into his arms, and fix him with an insistent look. “Right?”

Gaara was silent, for a moment, and Lee wondered if he’d known that the wind was about to pick up behind them – if he was letting the wild speak, or if he was steeling himself, or if it was just a coincidence that the spring seemed to come out in full on the cue of his tiny little sigh. And that silence was pitched like a tent over the two of them as he moved closer again; Lee hardly dared to move, in fear of knocking it all down, when Gaara pressed a (lighter, softer) kiss to the tip of his nose. “You’ll be the undeath of me, Lee,” he admonished. He tugged halfheartedly on Lee’s hand, pulling them both to their feet in a great gangle. “But . . . ”

“But?” Lee could feel a smile spreading across his face, untamed and uncontrollable, and as insistent as ivy as it burst into bloom.

“But the plan we settled on doesn’t even start until tomorrow,” Gaara relented. “If. Ah. If you’d, er, like to . . . to continue this. Elsewhere.”

“Desperately,” Lee echoed – and when Gaara laughed again, Lee could finally, finally, _finally_ exhale. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> baatch boy baatch boy babey . .. . AAAAAAAAAAHHHH--
> 
> anyways so uhh i'm am sofa king sorry this chapter was so delayed. life has been kicking my ass recently and we be? irritating. i was also left on "read" for the first time in my life so einar if you're reading this fuck you,
> 
> anyways i love you all so much and hopefully we can finish this huge project up without too many more oopsies <333


	11. When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky

Surprising absolutely no one, the library was silent.

For the first time in a long while, the dawn had broken over a cloudless morning, and the spring was patchy, if promising, where it streamed in through the windows. The weak sunlight bounced back in a thousand directions where it caught on the dew-slicked asphalt, and Lee was reminded of diamonds on jewellers’ velvet; the new growth of bushes and shoots was scattered across the skyline like a million green sequins. But Gaara’s eyes sparkled brighter than any of that as he smiled, and when Lee felt his breath catch in his throat for the umpteenth time, with Gaara’s umpteenth tiny grin, he wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off leaving the imagery behind them.

“ . . . forest,” someone was saying. Temari, Lee realised, after a beat. She’d sprawled out across an armchair in the far corner of their shared study, and she’d pulled her old bloomers up like Hammer pants. In short, she seemed the poster girl for teenage apathy – despite being about a century older than the average _Teen Vogue _reader. “Right, Gaara?”

“What?”

This time, Gaara’s smile was pained, and his lips twitched as he tried to keep it in place. “I, er, didn’t quite catchall that,” he explained, only half apologetically. Lee could feel the silence ebb in like the tide as his voice trailed off, the cool morning light chilling any unvoiced thoughts in their tracks. The two of them had found their perch in a nest of abandoned cardboard boxes, and Lee was pressed tight between Gaara and a ratty copy of _Wuthering Heights_. Wrapped in miles of fleece blankets and old sweatshirts, Gaara’s skin was almost warm against Lee’s, whose own cheeks were alive with wildfire. He’d never really understood the whole _“fireworks”_ thing before – but now, he could almost see the sparks of static lingering on Gaara’s kaleidoscope smile, the charge of a kiss he could still feel.

Temari didn’t look like she felt much other than annoyance. “I _said_,” she grumbled, “that so far, when we’ve encountered Hidan’s underlings, they’ve been hanging around forests.”

“Or motels,” mused Lee, thinking of Kakuzu. Temari didn’t spare him a second glance.

“It’s the easiest way for us – er, for, you know, for _vampires_ – to stay hidden. To hunt without attracting attention.” She splayed her hands. “So if we’re using today for recon, we’d best get to hiking.”

“Well, don’t _that_ sound like a kick in the teeth?”

Kankuro rarely spoke, and when he did, he seemed only to complain. He’d yet to shed his ratty ten-gallon hat, and he’d drawn his moth-eaten cravat so high around the scars on his neck it looked like a noose. When they’d first started laying their plans the night before, he’d been the only one out of all of them not to speak in favour of any of them: instead, Kankuro had staunchly insisted they all keep their heads down and hope for the best. It was why Gaara had delegated him to research duty with Gai and Kakashi, as they worked to form a coordinated plan of attack against Hidan and his Akatsuki – it was the closest he’d get to doing nothing at all.

“You’ll be giving them a home-field advantage, should a fight come up,” he drawled on. Though he fought to keep it at bay, Lee felt a different kind of spark run through his skin: sharp and stinging, shock hitting him between the shoulders like a blowdart. Lee tried his best not to start, but it was to little avail. The books behind him shook with his every tremor, and Gaara’s eyes were wide.

“So we avoid a fight.”

Neji was as pale as the library walls and his hair darker than the teak of the bookshelves, and as he stood in the doorway to the study, the long shadows blew his features into overexposure as the light cast a corona behind him. In his silk pyjama shirt, with his grim determination and that halo of springtime behind him, it was hard not to think of him as some avenging angel: the patron saint of the Dewey Decimal System.

“We need to keep you lot in one piece, anyway,” he was going on. “For the vaccine’s sake.”

Somewhere, someone in the room took a sharp inhale. Lee realised after a beat it might have been him. No matter who it was, though, it seemed to be the last breath any of them were ready to take: the silence that had hung like the mist over the study had come crashing down in a torrent, and that ghostly storm would have blown them all away should they have challenged it.

Still, Lee could feel his lungs begin to burn, and the question on his tongue burned hotter still. When he did speak, his words were rushed. “It’s done?” he breathed, hoping beyond hope. “Already?”

“Not even a little,” sniffed Neji. “That isn’t how science works.”

But he drew a small plastic case from his briefcase all the same, and when it caught the light, Lee thought he might very well be blinded by the Tupperware. A tiny test tube lay on a bed of Cellophane inside.

“The Revenant Infectious Pathogen,” said Neji. “Isolated, for the first time in history.”

Lee could feel questions building in the eaves above them all like an avalanche: he could feel Gaara’s weak pulse quicken into a fever pitch beneath his papery skin, see Temari tense along a thousand invisible lines, (sort of) alive for the first time all day. Only Kankuro was unimpressed, his voice whinging like the old floorboards did.

“I thought you told us you were fixing to make a vaccine,” he scoffed, drawing out the word: _“vacks-een.” _“What’re you gonna do with some sick in a bottle?”

Neji’s nostrils flared at Kankuro’s question, skin wrinkling along deep hollows and ravines as his tired eyes blazed. “First off, we’re right on track. And for the record,” he rushed to snap, “in isolating the virus, we can _prove_ that the RIP acts as a genetic vector, altering gene lines _in vitro_ – it’s groundbreaking science – we—”

“You’re brilliant, Neji.” Lee’s smile was forced, but the sentiment rang true, and he sat straighter for his earnest. “This is a huge first step.”

Neji straightened like clockwork, and Kankuro’s movements were equally rehearsed, an old ease setting in as he ducked low beneath his hat once more. Lee tried once more to exhale – but the breath lodged in his throat didn’t budge all the way until he leaned back, and felt Gaara take his hand once more. _“Crisis averted,” _he seemed to say. Lee had to wonder what Gaara thought his silent message was: if their latest exchange had been as terse and businesslike as any other at this impromptu meeting, or if he knew, somehow, that Lee’s heart skipped with every glance he took over his shoulder.

Perhaps there were tidings for both. Neji’s research was the crux upon which their whole sting hung, after all, and it came to them now – in that tiny test tube, in that shiny, shiny plastic – as something of a double-edged sword. Learning about the fire in Sakura’s blood had seemed a blessing at first, to be sure. And without piecing the facts together – without learning her birth mother had been bitten in the _“Rite of the Bijuu,”_ rallying her unborn daughter’schakra systems to battle against the RIP encroaching in on her – they certainly never would have figured out Hidan’s plans. But now that she and Neji had worked their pre-med magic on their scattered array of blood tests, Lee’s memories of the labs seemed to glow as bright and cold as uranium. Yes, they’d isolated the disease. Yes, they had a plan themselves. But those facts felt only like the candy coating on something undesirable: on the great peanut M&M that the mission had devolved into. Neji and Sakura couldn’t turn a strand of sick into a vaccine without a living sample of the vector in its unfettered form. They needed a vampire – a true vampire.

Hence the hiking.

There was a fallback, of course. A failsafe, wrapped in a Plan B. Tenten and Temari would be moonlighting at the lab, as backup to both teams: in battle and in biology. Temari had been ever so slightly susceptible to the stake than her brothers, after all; with all the damage she’d sustained from the Akatsuki over the years, her blood had become thinned with theirs, slight vestiges of chakra leaking out of fat lips and black eyes. That was to say, at first, if their strike team failed to hold their own, Tenten would help them fight. And then if all three of them failed, Temari would become the lab rat. To hear Neji say it to a sullen Kankuro or a skeptical Kakashi, it was neat and easy as origami.

But Lee had his doubts. Lee felt the double edge of that sword.

(_Well, _he reflected, _not just double. That’s four, five . . . we’re up in a lot more edges. A morningstar._)

(The thought wasn’t comforting.)

“So that . . . that leaves you two,” said Neji, at last. “Lee. Gaara.”

_That’s us,_ Lee wanted to say. Perhaps he could try for a joke: _“Those are our names, don’t wear ’em out.” _But his throat felt drier than any Southern summer as he searched for the words; when Gaara squeezed his hand, Lee could almost feel his bones grinding against one another. He’d never liked stakeouts. Patrolling was hard enough – with all that waiting and all that watching, anticipation never failed to give way to fear, whose icy fingers strangled every action. But their job had come to them all the same: he and Gaara were the ones who would be taking to the woods, to find the Akatsuki . . .

. . . and to take them alive.

Lee felt sick. He remembered what happened the _last_ time he’d tried to take a vampire alive.

“We all know our instructions,” said Sakura. She hovered uneasily by the doorway as she said it, and with a start, Lee realised he didn’t know _hers_. “Lee, Gaara, we’ll, uh, keep in touch. Pagers on.”

“Pagers on,” Lee echoed, dully. He dug his spine into the wall to inch taller, narrowing his eyes at Tenten across the room. _“Who put her in charge?”_ he asked, silently. _“What’s her game?”_

Tenten was stiff. Still. When she finally did catch Lee’s eye, he saw her stare was empty, eyes two dark smudges in a charcoal sketch of a face. _“Keep your head down,”_ she seemed to say. It wasn’t an answer – but Lee didn’t suppose he’d really been looking for one, anyway.

He watched their team trickle from the study like melting tar: slow and peeling, a warning of unsafe crossings. They may very well have been an unlaid road; they may very well have any number of pitch-dark promises stretching into the unknown. Lee had never been a homebody, but now, the thought of a journey ahead – any journey – made him nauseous. The thought of _anything_ made him nauseous, really.

“How’re you holding up?”

“I’m fine,” Lee answered, too quickly. When he turned to meet Gaara’s eye, he was met by a swirl of colour, half-processed images: at first because he’d moved too rapidly, and the blood rushed from his system, but then because his mind refused to process the scene in front of him. He was holding hands with a beautiful boy, and he’d never felt more like crawling into a hole and dying.

“I’m not fine,” he tried again. He blinked, and this time, with this halfhearted stab at the truth, Gaara’s image seemed clearer before him; that eerie dawn light sharpened along colouring-book contours to block in the blur of shapes. It felt like some cosmic reward for telling the truth, and Lee vowed he wouldn’t do any more of it. “Come on,” he said, willing the haze to close in around him again. “Let’s go for a hike.”

Of course, he said that, but they didn’t exactly make it that far.

The Jeep was parked between a willow tree and a chain-link fence, and the daybreak filtered through their stretching, yawning shapes to break the shadows and the faded paint job into jigsaw-puzzle pieces. When they moved, Lee could just make out the checkerboard shapes of light and shadow warping to accommodate them. To accommodate the blurs of Gaara’s features, his cheeks-nose-lips-eyes, too close to be clear. Then Lee closed his eyes again, and let darkness wash like summer rain over his senses, cleaning them from quandary. He felt each tiny flutter where his eyelashes grazed Gaara’s cheek, and each faint shock where Gaara’s cold fingers brushed his back, warmed by rushing blood and the polyester of his T-shirt. Most of all, he felt the faint vibrations rise at the base of Gaara’s throat, letting Lee know to smile against his partner’s lips just before be broke their touch to ask,

“What brought this on?”

Lee pretended to think, resting his forehead against Gaara’s. “Got to start the day with a healthy breakfast,” he decided, “and some rigorous physical activity.”

He’d barely forced the Kelloggs self-help slogan out before instinct shoved him back forward, and Lee brought his mouth to Gaara’s again. The kiss was sloppy, the contours of their bodies running together even before the gloaming washed them with uncertainty. But that didn’t stop Gaara from pushing hungrily against him, or his hands from tracing a labyrinth into Lee’s skin, where they roamed beneath his shirt. And it didn’t stop Lee from egging him on: from letting his butterfly kisses stray from Gaara’s mouth to his jaw, or from dragging their cartwheel of hands and lips around, letting Gaara’s bony weight push him into the car door. The cold metal came as the sharpest shock yet to the flash of exposed skin on his back, but Lee knew the best way to keep warm was to keep moving. He guided Gaara’s restless hands to his waist as he ducked lower, letting his teeth scrape the hollow of Gaara’s throat as he set to work on his bloodless neck.

“Mm – come on,” whispered Gaara. His words were halting between his shuddering breaths, and he’d balled his fingers into fists at Lee’s sides. “We have – mm – we have to get going before light.”

“Ssh,” protested Lee, leaning into Gaara’s shoulder. “I’m doing some of my best work here.” He let his eyes slide shut again, and tangled his fingers in Gaara’s windblown hair, hoping that he could navigate the topography of Gaara’s skin with chapstick and good will alone. When he felt something hard and foreign brush against Burt’s Bees, he broke into a startled grin. “Kiss it better?” Lee heard himself ask Gaara, whose voice had, between tiny gasps, shot up at least an octave.

“I’ve never been better,” he mumbled, and Lee felt his cheeks grow hot – almost uncomfortably so. Indeed, his lips burned beneath the thin sheen of cherry chapstick coating them, and Lee felt pins and needles tingle through them as he brushed against Gaara’s throat again. He’d brought his mouth to the tiny pinprick scars left by the bite that had Turned him, and for some reason, the thought terrified him.

Lee straightened awkwardly against the door of the Jeep, and drew his hand down from Gaara’s hair, to let his fingers ghost the outline of the bite mark. “Kiss it better,” he breathed, again. Then: “I want to make it better. All of it.”

“I know.” Gaara’s eyes were milky and unreadable, his mouth a thin line as he untangled himself from Lee’s embrace. “You will. _We_ will. And we start here and now.”

Lee kicked halfheartedly at the ground, and watched, dully, as his foot bounced back from the concrete to the tyre of the Jeep. “I’m scared,” he admitted. Saying it out loud felt like swallowing nails. Like contracting all three stages of Lyme disease while doing sit-ups on a bed of broken glass.

“Fear is a rational evolutionary response to danger,” said Gaara. He rocked back on the balls of his feet, eyes blue and endless as the sky as they roamed across the dim suburban street. Then his lips, still swollen and ever-so-slightly red, from all that kissing, quirked into a smile. “And through extensive reading of Tenten’s comic books while you were in the shower last night, I’ve deduced that there’s but one other rational, evolutionary response to danger.”

“And what’s that?”

“Superpowers.”

Lee felt a laugh bubble up in his throat, but it didn’t make it out: it stopped at the base of his tongue, the breath hard and sour, like an old Jawbreaker. He had to crack his jaw around the sounds, too, and they came out strangled. “What?”

“_Superpowers_,” said Gaara again, flitting to the passenger side door. He moved in a way he rarely did – faster than a blink and softer than a whisper, with all the grace that Gothic literature had promised to vampires. “We’ve got the world at our disposal, Lee,” he said, as Lee settled into the driver’s seat. “We have the resources from your Watchers’ Council and we’ve got Neji and Miss Sakura working their magic and gods, almighty, we’ve got you. Lee, you’re amazing,” he was pleading, wrapping Lee’s wrist in his long hands. “You’re a Slayer. You’re a fighter. You’re the Flash and that Superman fella and Mister Fantastic all rolled into one.”

Lee tried again for a laugh. “None of them are Black.”

“Well, that’s not hardly my fault,” said Gaara, in his most Southern accent – making it sound like it very much _was_ his fault. Lee smiled.

“Then you can be the unholy Fruit Roll-Up of Ghost Rider, Morbius, and Black fucking Widow,” he admonished.

“What? No!” Gaara feigned outrage. “I want to be Northstar!”

“Move out, Alpha Flight,” Lee relented, sticking the keys in the ignition. “Let’s do this.”

Lee’s sneakers were shiny-new, and their soles _“sque-ea-eaked”_ as he ground his foot down on the gas pedal, driving all his weight into that proud twenty horsepower. Maple Street rolled beneath them like a conveyor belt, and their old tires tumbled against the slick asphalt; the Jeep hurtled toward the edge of town like a comet, and the rising sun was as great a cosmic threat to them as it was Halley’s famous ball of ice. Lee pretended not to notice the way Gaara sank against the towel he’d taped over the window, or how his grip tightened, ever so slightly, where his hand rested on Lee’s thigh. All he did was smile, hoping that the sunshine of his grin was a source of warmth – and that it wasn’t turning Gaara’s stomach.

The Uzushio reservation was no further away than it ever was, but the highway seemed as endless as a roll of duct tape as they sped along, the comfortable silence they’d worn inside town limits falling over them like a cape. At the corner of the windshield, Lee could just see the mottled edges of the moon, still high in the early-morning sky. It seemed to glare down at him like the eye of God, high, mighty, and silent in its judgement. Only when a wisp of cloud passed over its pale shape did Lee think he could hear its taunt:

_This mission was doomed from the get-go._

The Jeep spluttered and choked as they ground to a halt at a campsite parking lot, and Lee spared Gaara a joking grimace as they piled from the front seats. “It’s got an upset tummy,” he joked. “Drank too much gasoline.”

“Kankuro did that once,” said Gaara. Lee was almost shocked enough to miss a step, and he felt Gaara tug on his wrist as they moved around to the trunk of the car.

“Neji once drank glue,” he recalled, then. “When we were fourteen, fifteen or so. It was school glue, so it wasn’t dangerous, but it got all in his braces, and then he couldn’t take out the rubber bands . . . ”

Lilting syllables filled the gaps in the birdsong as Lee chattered along, talking with his hands and with the odd high kick as he told the tale of his, Tenten’s, and Neji’s first-ever rager (glue and all). As they wandered down the hiking trail, Lee’s brightly coloured sneakers and Gaara’s borrowed hiking boots flashing like fairy lights against the new grass, Lee watched the scene unfold in front of him: watched the strip of sky turn into the blue of the ocean and heard the redwood forest’s chatter turn into Madonna’s _Express Yourself_. Slowly but surely, the wood was transformed into Kurotsuchi-from-Class-A’s beach house, and Lee was fifteen again as he crossed one foot in front of the other, unwilling to disturb the harmony between the bass and the creaking floorboards. Fifteen as he—

_ “Shit!”_

—as he screamed like a soprano, feeling every hair on his body rise to meet the high C. “Gods,” Gaara was swearing, his hand suddenly slack in Lee’s. “Gods, get back, Lee, get—”

Lee could only think to move forward, though, falling to his knees. The hiking trail was made of hard-packed dirt, but the ground beneath him now was damp, clumps of soil crumbling against the walls of deep footprints. The soil was a van Gogh in swirls and piles, grooves painting the story of a scuffle, framed by bent leaves and cracked branches. Even without the blood, Lee would have known there’d have been a fight.

But there was blood – rivers of it. It was a vicious scarlet even where it mixed with the mud, and made lifeless skin shine like satin in the rising sunlight. There was so much of it that Lee hardly registered the body at first, not even as he tripped over it. Now, as the blood began to seep into his Converse, Lee could hardly register anything but. It – he? – was the silvery-pale of the moon, skin cold, but still soft, where it edged out from black Lycra and rivers of blood. He (_it_?) lay supine, limbs spread-eagle in a sun salutation. The sun certainly saluted back. Its light caught in a thousand glittering facets and waltzed away from a thousand tiny shadows where his – its – where _the body_’s throat was torn open: a great bloody crescent of the wound, tattered skin a pale halo around . . . well . . . the blood.

When Lee inched closer, there was a part of him that noted that the trachea had been ripped out. Then there was another part of him that wanted to hurl, and another that wanted to run, and another that couldn’t manage anything but a weak sob. There were so many parts, and there was so little time.

“Lee, stand up.”

Gaara’s voice was as smooth and unyielding as steel, and his movements kung-fu-movie tough as he yanked Lee to his feet, pulling him off the bloodstained road and into the safety of the bushes. But his touch was soft and dandelion-light when he pulled Lee into a gentle hug; Lee imagined him changing hands like clothes – swapping steel for silk like the crime scene was an Old Navy dressing room.

“Stand up,” Gaara urged him again. This time, he whispered so faintly, Lee struggled to hear him over the wind. “Stand straight, buck up. It’s dead. It can’t hurt you.”

That was the least of Lee’s worries. Blinking away tears, he followed Gaara’s instructions, turning stiffly against him to face the road again. When he looked for the second time, there wasn’t as much blood. Or maybe he was actively blocking it out: his mind turning the swathes of red to sunspots to blink away as his gaze wandered across the body.

“He was young,” Lee blurted out. The man was livor-mortis bloated, lips thin and blue, but Lee could still see he’d only been around twenty-five. _Six years older than me,_ he thought, dumbly. He’d been halfway to thinking, _Four years older than Gaara,_ but that wasn’t true. Gaara was a hundred and twenty. Gaara was deader than the body was.

“Buck up,” whispered Gaara – dead or not – for a second time. He let his fingers meet Lee’s again. “Don’t spiral, Lee, keep talking to me. What were we talking about? Before?”

“A . . . a party,” Lee choked out. “A party when I was in high school.”

“All right,” Gaara said, taking a tentative step back toward the road. “Why don’t you keep telling me about that? Let’s see . . . I know Slayers move around a lot. Where was the party?”

Lee’s knees were knocking together, and even as he fought to stay upright, he could practically feel the ground rushing up to meet him. Too slowly, he realised it was because mud still caked the knees of his sweatpants, the grey heather warm and sticky with the blood soaked into the soil. His vision swam, but the odd burst of light reached through to him: the shapes of the forest edging in and out of clarity like they were playing Marco Polo at the community pool. Here was a tree, and then there was the swirl of red and brown – there was the collapsed body, lips peeling from teeth, filed into shark-like points. Here was that great stop-sign of a wound, and there, glinting like a penny at the bottom of a fountain, a silver pendant twinkled against the angry red. A tiny inverted triangle: the symbol of Jashin.

Lee could hear Madonna again. _“I can feel your power – just like a prayer!” _she cried, as a stormy sea crashed against the deck of Kurotsuchi’s beach house, threatening to sweep thirty drunk teenagers away. The water had already been red-tinged with algae. A few weeks after that party – after the glue and rubber bands and prayer – it would run red with an innocent girl’s blood.

Finally, Lee spoke. “The party?” he echoed, thinking of anything but. “It was in Kiri.”

Konoha redwoods could grow a hundred metres tall, and the forest was dark beneath their crowns. The few patches of sky that winked through their crowns had long since yielded to the cloud cover of an oncoming storm, and the ground was a chessboard of blocky greys where the clouds’ shadows warred with the trees’. Lee felt like a pawn on the enemy colour’s squares as he moved: like he’d been pushed out those opening two squares, and waited, now, to be the game’s first casualty.

Gaara, for his part, moved between the great wooden walls of the trees with all the ease of _“Baby’s First Checkers:” _he skipped across the dappled forest floor with supernatural speed, his silhouette long and streamlined as he arched his neck, nose to the sky like a bloodhound. Lee was fond enough of Twin Peaks to deduce that the body hadn’t been dead for longer than three hours. But for Gaara, with his keen hunter’s instincts and a century of experience under his rodeo-star belt, the Langer lines might as well have been drawn in Sharpie, and they painted a map Lee could never picture. Even above the car-freshener smell of the redwoods, he followed what he swore was the metallic stench of blood, chattering all the while. There had been no bugs on the body, had Lee noticed that? All animals, no matter how small, could sense a vampire’s poison, and learned to avoid it. But had he noticed the signs of struggle? Though the man had clearly been mauled by a vamp, they hadn’t overpowered him so easily. He must have been strong, Gaara thought.

Lee had made a weak gurgle of a laugh, and felt he deserved it when a low-hanging alder branch slapped against his face. _Either he’d been strong,_ Lee had thought, _or vampires like to play with their food._

“Halt!”

Gaara held a pale fist up like a drill sergeant, and Lee snapped duly to attention. In the dim of the woods, his egg-white skin flashed like the world’s worst road flare, a neon sign in the making as he signalled Lee forward, to another halt, and then forward again.

Finally, he spoke again, voice hoarse as a telltale crack echoed against the hollows of his cheeks. “Trail stops here,” he hissed, lisping around his feeder fangs. Lee hadn’t seen them this close since he’d let Gaara drink from him, back in Ame – after Kakuzu’s attack – and watched in horrified fascination as the thin white teeth broke from scabbed-over holes in his gums, crusted with Gaara’s lifeless black blood. “And lookit.”

It was well-hidden, but Lee – with all the training of a Slayer, and the attentiveness of a boy who’d played many a gas station spot-the-difference game – could just make it out at the base of the treeline. The forest had begun to thin out by this point, and the redwoods, smaller, now, and thinner, scraped at the sky like the album cover for _Unknown Pleasures_. Nestled there between their pulsar lines was a tiny shack, its thatched roof melting easily into the greenery around it, only for its graffiti-covered walls to shine a beacon through the monochrome of the woods.

“Happy birthday to us,” whispered Lee, absurdly. The blood had dried on the knees of his sweatpants. He brought his thumb to his mouth to wet it, and then swiped it across his leg, back and forth, until the dead man’s blood was nothing but a faint red shadow on his right knee. “Are you ready?”

They hadn’t packed much for the hiking trip: they’d move faster without big backpacks, and could drink stream water and sleep in the Jeep should the need arise. But Lee and Gaara both wore their fanny-packs tight and secure, and Gaara deftly drew two sharpened stakes from his.

“As I’ll ever be,” he said coolly, zipping the tie-dye Jansport back up. “Are you?”

_ No. _“Yes, of course.” _Very much “no.”_

Lee had read once that some animals could smell lies: horses, dogs. He wondered if _Homo dracula-cosplay-ensis_ could do the same. But Gaara only shifted on his feet, his gaze wary. Cagey. And caged _in_, Lee reflected, as he watched the shadows of Gaara’s eye sockets sink beneath the bulging shapes of his cheekbones and monster jaw. He thought back to their conversation about superheroes before they’d left, and fought the urge to giggle._ It’s clobbering time, _he thought.

But unlike the Thing, Lee moved silently as the two of them padded into the clearing, weaving like eels through a river as they moved from shadow to shadow. The forest had a habit of creeping up on you, Lee knew: uneven ground and tricks of the light made distances seem longer than they were. Before he knew it, they were close enough to the shack for Lee to see his ashen face in the only non-shattered window – and close enough for Lee to blame the constriction in his throat on the smell of fresh paint, rather than dread.

_ Devils or no devils,_ he heard Gai say to him, then. It was the Slayer’s creed, written by van Helsing in the journal he’d kept while offing Dracula. “_Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not: we fight them all the same.” _He whispered it to himself, quickly, and all at once; training may have beaten the shakiness from his hands, but Lee could not keep it from his voice.

Gaara shot him a sidelong look. “‘Doctor,’” he quipped, “‘you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t, with eyebrows like yours.’”

Lee was startled into speaking, and he barely remembered to whisper. “You’ve read the Dracula journals?”

“I lived them” was Gaara’s stiff answer. He folded his hands at his waist, twin stakes overlapping in a cross. “Now let’s do Asuma van Helsing proud.”

Lee never thought he’d hear a vampire say that, and he felt his mind struggling to process it for their whole walk round to the door. Then he kicked it in.

_“Crash!”_ The floor was littered with broken glass, Budweiser and bottle caps staining the packed-dirt floor arsenic green. The door, already crooked on rusted hinges, screeched in protest as it swept across the glass, crashing through the stained-glass, church-window illusion with abandon. It was a terrible combination of sounds, one that reached deep into Lee’s bones, and threatened to turn them to jelly. And as an ardent avoider of Jell-O, Lee knew to leap.

_ “Thock!” _Muscle hit muscle with a dull, squishy sound: something all the training and all the protein powder in the world couldn’t harden. Fistfights were fleshy and messy, and Lee moved blindly through the charcuterie scene unfolding around him. He felt his hand scrape the lantern line of a jaw, and let his foot meet the same hard bone in a sweeping roundhouse kick. When he felt his knee bend back toward his chest, Lee used the last of his momentum to stomp down, hoping the _“crunch” _he heard was someone’s toes. And then back! He wasn’t so stupid as to stay in the thick of the fight. Whirling like a pinwheel, he dragged his target along the sea-serpent ridges of his knuckles to the dim sunlight outside, hoping for any edge he could get.

“Smart, Lee!” Gaara was at his side in a flash, only to shove him, with all his strength, into the grass. Lee rolled before thinking to ask questions. The hole of the doorway was still a black blur in his spinning vision, but the blur was moving: taking the shape of two figures, impossibly fast, barrelling from what must have been their shack to what he hoped would be their doom.

_ Not doom, _Lee reminded himself, sharply._ Capture. We need them alive._

A rush of air sent his bangs dancing across his brow just before the haymaker did, and Lee felt his back twinge in pain as he arched to avoid another swinging punch. _Alive,_ he told himself. “Alive.”

“What was that, fleshie?”

The speaker didn’t stop moving as he sneered, winding up for a third blow to the air next to Lee’s head. He was a tall, thin man with a mop of orange hair, its colour impossibly bright against his sallow skin and the gunmetal piercings wedged into his sharp features. “What was that?” he demanded again. He spoke like a jilted drunk, and fought like one, too, but Lee decided he wouldn’t expect a barfight.

“I said we met your friend, _Ginger_ Rogers,” he panted, “and that he didn’t exactly look alive. Actually, homeboy looked like Shark Week. Teeth all pointy—” he ducked low, and, rolling through his crouch, delivered a swift kick to the back of the man’s knee “—and throat ripped out. Very PG-13.”

“Kisame,” breathed a second voice. This was a woman, and she danced away from each of Gaara’s lunges with a dancer’s grace, her thin frame fluttering like paper in the wind. Her hair was dyed a brilliant blue, and she had piercings to match her partner’s; Lee wondered how they did the whole fang thing with all that metal in their faces. “He was delicious.”

“He was human,” spat Lee, as he grabbed the ginger’s wrist, and slammed down hard on his arm, wrenching his shoulder around to drive the man’s elbow into his own kidney.

“So are you,” puffed the ginger. “I wonder, do you like vampires as much as Kisame did?”

His tone was ever-mocking, but this time, the sneer didn’t wash over all of his words. Instead, it lapped at the question like low tide against the beach, and let the goading bob like a buoy against his breathless voice. This time, when Lee swerved to avoid him, he felt like a reed snapped by the wind.

“What do you know?” he hissed. The ginger grinned, the ring in his eyebrow glinting.

“Jashin knows all,” he said, grinning. His teeth were straight and white, but as Lee watched his lips thin over them, he saw long yellow fangs broach the grey line of his gums. “God knows all.”

“‘Know’ this!” Lee’s heart was in his throat, and there was a tiny fraction of his mind – his centre of gravity, holding him fast as he reared back – that marvelled at the McDonald’s-combo promise that might have held for a vampire trying to eat him. But the rest of his mind was empty, his head dead weight on square shoulders as he dove for the ginger, tackling him to the ground. His fist closed around a tiny twig, no longer than his pinky, and he raked it against the man’s pierced face as he punched him hard in the nose. The twig snapped, but the sound was drowned out easily by a horrible crackling: by the tiny scrape he’d inflicting smouldering at the edges, the ginger’s white skin greying into patches of ash.

“Now you’ve done—” he began, and Lee brought his fist down on his face again. A trickle of something thick and inky had begun beneath his nose, and dimly, Lee realised this was as close as a vampire could get to a nosebleed.

“_Aaaaagh_!”

His realisations were cut short by a bloodcurdling scream, and Lee started to his feet, jumping back from his vampire as though he’d been the one to get burned. He saw a flash of auburn, and watched Gaara, stake in hand, copy the motion, leaping away like a gazelle.

_Wait, _thought Lee. _Stake? Singular?_

The blue-haired vamp was hunched over in front of Gaara, hands in a prayer fold at her chest. She shrieked again, and flung her hands to the sky – pale skin blown into overexposure where it warred against black clouds, black blood, and black wood.

“No,” breathed Gaara. Lee could not breathe at all.

Again and again the woman shrieked, her mouth impossibly wide, open over a mess of fangs. It was a sound made half in pain and half in what Lee might have thought ecstasy – if he’d thought a vampire capable of the emotion.Pride, he supposed.

“Aaagh! Aaagh! _Aaaaaagh_!”

And then the sound was cut off: once again by a horrible, muted crackling. Slowly but surely, the woman’s pale skin faded against the grey sky where ash raced up her veins. Her fingers bent at impossible angles as she seemed to try to shake the burn from her hands, and let the stake fall to the ground—

The stake! Once more, Lee lunged, but not even a Slayer was fast enough to stop its fall. The crackling grew louder and louder, embers popping like firecrackers on the fourth of July. The stake – eleven inches of Home Depot balsa wood, coated in dark stain Neji had bought off an infomercial – was a slip of a thing, its shadow barely discernible against the high grass and dappled tree cover. But the flash of orange was all too visible. As the woman let her flesh crackle and burn, so too did the little wooden stake, the embers of her wound catching on the wood – turning it into a torch.

“No!” said Gaara again. Lee moved toward his voice, and felt their bodies collide (heard that awful, fleshy sound) but there was little to do, other than gawk. The forest was wet enough, but the brilliant orange flame moved with avarice: the same hungry look that the vampires wore above their septum piercings. It snaked across the grass, popping with glee as it moved in a sunburst from their fight: toward the treeline, toward the ginger’s prone form, and toward the tiny shack, with its mess of splintering wood and its tangled-grass roof. The heady smell of wood smoke had already begun to war against the spray paint on the shack’s walls, and Lee’s eyes had begun to water.

As a tongue of flame licked at a crude message in red paint, it was finally Lee’s turn to speak. “No,” he parroted, feeling Gaara clutch at his arm. “No, no, no—”

But the vampires were grinning _“yes,” _and the fire wasn’t listening at all. The shack took slowly, but it took all the same, thin bands of red and orange braiding themselves together between the lines of its siding. The ginger vampire scrambled to his feet, cackling with ill-timed glee.

“Do you like vampires, fleshie?” he demanded of Lee once more. “Do you want to play our games?”

“No,” Lee pleaded. Even though he knew vampires had heightened senses, his cry fell on deaf ears. The vampires cackled along, and beside him, Lee heard Gaara curse every god scribbled into the margins of the Good Book. But the crackling of embers was louder still, and Lee was trapped in Kiri again as he watched the forest drown in a sea of red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so  
\- where have i been  
\- i have done some things  
\- i raised a few hundred thousand dollars  
\- quit my job  
\- got a new job  
\- then a real job  
\- raised some more money  
\- went through it  
\- got into college  
\- lost my second job due to corona  
\- went through it two electric boogaloo  
\- and here i am (once again feeling lost but now and then i breathe it in and let it go)
> 
> ps shoutout to paul simon. i’ve gotten to work with him and he’s a real g
> 
> real talk though i’m sorry i dipped but i am BACK and we will FINISH THIS RIDE. TOGETHER


	12. Daughter

_All Lee could see was red._

_ They were months away from cranberry season, but the bogs were already a great bloodstain on the horizon, a pinkish-red streak where the sky had ripped off the Band-Aid of the spring too soon. The mid-June sunset stretched scarlet fingers across the lifeless silver sky, and the bluffs played an eager game of tag with its fiery glow, at times catching brilliant red halos, and at times – on those sharper knife-edges of the beach, on those places where the topographical maps of the area were ink-stained and pixellated – throwing them back out to sea. And oh, gods, the _sea. _The winter had been short, and the spring boiling, and so the red tide had come in early. The algae had bloomed this summer with avarice; the ocean was the colour of magma and even more dangerous. The noxious colour that leapt with each high tide bore with it the promise of all kinds of poisoning (and probably UTIs)._

_ But UTIs or no, it was into the surf Lee was bounding now, the harsh red water turning the cotton of his jeans to cement. He tried to think of the blood-coloured sea like paint, or Kool-Aid – like from that time Tenten had tried to go ginger in the bathtub – anything but a crimson hurricane in the making. The sea didn’t exactly heed his thoughts. As the wind tore across the shore, the red tide whipped itself into a frenzy, the seafoam a pale, fleshy pink at the caps of waves as sharp and hard as rubies._

_ “So you came.”_

_ Lee couldn’t hear much above the wind or the crashing of the tide, but he knew he was being spoken to all the same. Rain clouds bore heavy down on Kiri everywhere but here: no, here, the setting sun was still a proud ring of fire in the sky, blotting out the shape of his target until he was nothing more than an inkblot on the watercolour visage of the horizon._

_ “You came,” came the voice again, like a knife over stone – like a fresh manicure against gunmetal. Lee thought he could hear the chill tumbling down his spine, like the battlecry of a rattlesnake, and the thought brought a flurry of red spots to his vision._

_ “I’ve been waiting for you, Lee.”_

“Lee!”

The heady air snapped, crackled, and popped in its best _Rice Krispies _all around them, but this crack was the sharpest yet. Gaara’s open palm snapped across Lee’s face like a whip, and his grip was vicelike as it fell to Lee’s tight shoulders, moving to shake him back and forth. “Lee,” he panted again, “come on, buck up.”

“Wh . . . what?” was the best Lee could manage. The ground beneath him was damp, dew worming slowly into the honeycomb cracks of his pelvis. He knew his pants would go stiff with the added moisture, but even the fear of that ballast didn’t jolt him upright.

Gaara’s voice did, though; it was terse and smooth all at once, like a snapping flag. “You fainted,” he whispered, helping Lee to his feet. “You . . . your eyes went wide, and then you started hyperventilating, and by that point, the smoke had gotten to you. I dragged you as far as I could.”

_ “As far as Gaara could”_ turned out to be barely a hundred yards from the shack, but half that far down into a winding ditch, mossy and cool beneath a crisscross of fallen trees. Lee felt his hand brush something slimy, and looked down to see a vibrant red toadstool propped against his thumb, its cap as bright as a road flare.

As bright as a forest fire. Lee took a shuddery breath, willing the green of the forest floor to wash the last of the red from his vision as he pieced a slideshow of abstract images together. Though burning, blocky shapes warred against one another like Picasso’s heavy period, Lee managed to find a red (well, maybe not _red_) thread, and pull it fast. They’d found the body of that man, Kisame. A worshipper of Jashin, though clearly not as ardently as the two vampires.

_ That’s right, _Lee reminded himself, _two. _He’d been locked into a fight with the one of them: a lanky ginger with a mess of bad piercings and a monstrous maw of messy, crooked teeth. (Surely, nine out of ten dentists would have hated him.) The other had been a woman, her hair dyed an electric, mocking blue. She’d been Gaara’s bag . . . and she’d plunged a stake into her heart, knowing the chakra overload would cause it – and the woods around them – to catch fire. (If he was an orthodontist’s worst nightmare, the tiny voice at the back of Lee’s mind went on to quip, she was Smokey the Bear’s). It should have been too damp for anything to catch, but the air was sour with smoke even down here, and the embers’ chorus was incessant.

“Who were they?” Lee managed, at last. He remembered that Gaara had been able to identify Kakuzu, the Akatsuki vampire to attack them back in Ame, and hoped he could do the same now. Names alone would have been a miracle – but there was a glimmer, a candle-glow of desperation to burn at the centre of Lee’s optimism, barely daring to hope Gaara knew their weaknesses, too.

Gaara only thinned his lips. “They’ve dyed their hair,” he muttered, offhand. “But that’s Nagato and Konan. Hidan’s oldest confidantes.”

“How old is that?”

“_Old_,” whispered Gaara, his tone hovering between reverent and horrified. “Hidan said they helped build the Parthenon.”

Lee stiffened, and his fingers twitched into fists. Beneath his thumb, the toadstool gave up its fight against the rot seeping through the ravine: the cap split neatly in two, red outsides crumbling away to reveal something black and sticky as melting tar. Death, Lee supposed. _That’s what we’ll all look like some day._

He didn’t say it. What he did say was, “Well, I guess that makes you eligible for a senior’s discount,” and he tried to grin – a tightening of lips, a flash of chattering teeth. The sarcasm wasn’t like him. It was barely even like quippy Tenten or sullen Kankuro, both of whom he’d learned could suck it up, and take things seriously, during times of crisis. No, these halfhearted one-liners were just the last remnants of his coherent thoughts, scraped from the darkest corners of his mind like the last Nutella from the jar, and spread too thin over burnt toast and a burning forest.

“You’ve met them,” Lee went on, after a beat. His hair had fallen low over his forehead, and his bangs, their coils steamed and oiled into flatness, clouded his vision just like the smoke. “And Kakuzu, too, right? You know these guys. Their weaknesses.”

Gaara stiffened. “I know _of_ them,” he protested. “And I know that they don’t _have_ any weaknesses.”

“Everyone has weaknesses.”

“Yeah? Even you?”

Gaara’s eyes were watery, but cold: any emotions warring in his gaze did so from beneath the cover of glaciers. But Lee wouldn’t be cowed: quite the contrary. As the air grew to an acrid, stinging warmth above them, he yearned for the cool familiarity of Gaara’s gaze. His touch. His calm veneer, and the gentle tide of his emotions. _“Even you?” _he’d asked. Lee knew the answer was a resounding _“yes”_ – a thousand times yes. But as the warmth of the spring and the fire built around them, Lee longed to be as unflappable as the winter cold. So he shook his head.

“We have to get back up there,” he said instead, folding his arms. “We can take them – and we will. We’ll take them alive.”

_“We take her alive.”_

_ Lee’s mouth might, under ordinary circumstances, been set in a grim line. Now, he could hardly move his lips around his words, lest his mouth fill with blood. His teeth were gritted, and his voice grittier. Still, he had forced himself to his feet, watching his blood mingle with the crimson tide around his ankles._

_ “_None_ of you are leaving this alive,” spat Yagura. At fourteen, going on forty, he had evidently perfected his baleful sneer. The first time they had fought him, Lee remembered joking to Tenten how this tiny teen vampire somehow managed to be the least scary eighth grader he had ever seen. That wasn’t true anymore. Now, Yagura Karatachi appeared to him as four feet, eleven inches of pure evil. His sneer was lopsided, left cheek wrinkled by a monstrous scar, and his fangs grew crooked, like conks on a wizened old tree. Though his left eye was milky with cataracts, hate burned in his right, which was a bloodshot belladonna violet._

_“Do you hear me?” he roared, when Lee didn’t – couldn’t – answer. “None of you! _None_! This is_ my _town, Slayers! And this—” he kicked at a limp body, face-down in the surf “—this is _my_ prize!”_

_ “She’s just a little girl,” pleaded Tenten. Her eyes were swollen shut with bruises, and she clutched her stake close to her own heart, as though she weren’t quite sure who she would rather stab. Lee didn’t blame her. They had been fighting Yagura for nearly forty-eight hours now, running in desperate circles through Kiri while he painted a brilliant red sunset across its streets. They were barely hanging on – and he had barely gotten started._

_ Though his limbs cried out in protest, waves of pain crashing against his shoulder, Lee lifted his arm to Tenten. Wincing, he flashed a quick peace sign, a shaka, and finally closed a loose fist. They didn’t often resort to signing out their tactics – usually, they could anticipate the other’s punches before they were ever thrown – but now, Lee knew that Tenten needed all the help he could give her. That was what he had instructed her, in their shaky, _Quackadilioso_ code: that they would split up. That she would try to save young Rin Nohara, drowning in both seawater and her own blood, and that he would take Yagura on._

_ Tenten thinned her lips. She was nodding in understanding, acceptance – but when her eyes flickered open, they were dark with anger. Though she had never said it aloud, Lee knew that she blamed him for where they were now. So did he. After all, he’d been the one to fail to kill Yagura in the first place, believing a child could never be capable of the horrors he had yet to enact._

_ But Lee had been a child when he’d killed his first vampire, letting its skin and pitch-black blood explode over his hands as it burned around the hilt of its stake. He’d been a child the first time he’d needed to blood-let a bite, hunched over his father’s shaking body as Gai’s blood turned to poison._

_ And Yagura wasn’t even a child. Not anymore._

_ The two of them darted away from each other, closing like a crab’s pincer around the sandbar where Yagura stood. Tenten dove for the surf, letting her weak legs finally give out from beneath her as she lunged for Rin’s unconscious form, dragging her off in a lifeguard’s sidestroke. The rip had long since begun to churn around them, but Tenten was riding the tide, letting it carry her away from the carnage. Soon enough, she had left Lee and Yagura alone._

_ But as Lee wound his aching shoulder back, rearing up for a wild haymaker, he realised that they _weren’t_ alone. As he turned toward the shore, Lee could hear something high and shrill cut through the crashing waves: a stranger’s voice, screaming bloody murder._

_ He barely saw her, but later, Neji would tell him that the sheriff’s office had identified her body as that of Yagura’s mother, pushing a clean ninety years old. She didn’t move like an octogenarian. She had moved like a whirlwind, and looked like one, too: her dyed-red hair and her orange muumuu errant wisps of the bloody sunset as she tore through the surf. Only a glint of silver in her shaking hands ruined the illusion: shattering it with a _“crack!” _that would echo in Lee’s mind forever._

_ “It’s too late,” Yagura was taunting. He was hovering over Lee, towering over him. Too slowly, Lee remembered that Yagura had never been that tall. What he didn’t remember was falling into the surf, but clearly, he must have. The water was lapping at his tired arms, and his shaking knees were pushing new serpentine ripples through the red tide, the scarlet algae churning around him. The colour had taken on a new vibrance, clawing at him with avarice. For a beat, dizzy with confusion and pain, Lee thought he might still be able to withstand its grasp._

_ But when he looked down at himself, Lee saw a fresh red sunburst stretching across the left side of his chest – the side where his heart didn’t beat._

Lee’s throat was tight as he clambered from the ditch, and smoke wrapped around it in thick, heavy ropes, tightening with every breath he couldn’t take. The rain had all but put out the forest fire – but somehow, that was the least of Lee’s worries. As he pushed himself to his feet, shaking the last few seconds (minutes? hours?) from his head, he watched the forest come to un-life in bits and pieces around him, and saw every flash of colour as a new Impressionist nightmare. The redwoods curled away from the clearing like a leviathan ribcage, and the strip of grey sky above was as dense and unyielding as any sternum, locking the cage bars tight. Fingers of smoke and ash clawed desperately for freedom, ripping great swathes of grey through the yellow-green of the grass. Its every blade cast a shadow longer than the freeway. But theirs were not the shadows Lee cared about: he narrowed his eyes against the ash coating his lashes to draw a select few shades from the gloaming. Three human . . . _humanoid_ . . . figures. Almost familiar. Almost comforting.

_ Almost, _he realised dimly, _almost too many._

He whipped his head so quickly to the side he heard his neck crack. Gaara was not beside him. Nor was he back in the ditch, waiting out the building storm as they had the fire. There was a part of Lee that wanted to beg his body not to look up: to beg his shoulders to stay curled inward, and his neck tucked in, away from fangs and free from supporting the weight of his conscious head. But years of hardened instinct lined his muscles, like a Kevlar vest (if only marginally less bulletproof). Lee forced himself back to reality.

“Konan. Nagato.”

Gaara’s voice wasn’t quite pained, but it was . . . Lee struggled for a word. _Hollow_, he decided at last. The first time he’d heard Gaara speak, he remembered thinking of his voice like a dry summer wind. He’d heard it at its warmest and softest, promising sweet nothings and summer road trips; he’d heard it whiplike with anger, his Southern accent laden with barbs. Now, Gaara’s twanging vowels rattled listlessly from his lips, and his consonants bowed away from them like lone trees facing the Dust Bowl. He was coughing more than he was speaking. At the same time, Lee would have recognised his grandstanding from a thousand paces. Whether or not his voice would comply, Gaara was going to give a speech.

He spread his hands like a preacher, and lifted his chin proudly. “I remember when my siblings and I first met you,” he was saying. “I remember Hidan was so proud of you two – prouder than our father had ever been of us. I remember how he told us that us vampires were Jashin’s chosen. I remember the two of you looking about as pleased as someone chosen for the _noose_.”

“That was a hundred years ago,” grumbled Nagato. Konan flashed him a warning look, but Gaara leapt, faster than her blink.

“And what have you spent these hundred years doing?” he demanded. “Hunting, and being hunted, like _animals_! Eating humans! Fearing Slayers! What God would have chosen this for you?”

“And what have you chosen?” Nagato shot back. “You _shacked up _with a Slayer! You call us ‘animals,’ boy? You’re a lapdog.”

“Rather a lapdog than a monster.”

“Rather a monster than a joke.”

Nagato drew himself taller, and Lee winced away from his dyed-orange hair, as bright and startling as a road flare. Whether it was beneath its Manic Panic glare or from behind the smoky air, he was still hidden. But Gaara couldn’t entertain them forever – Lee wouldn’t let him. There was no talking these two down. He had found the lone exception (and its two siblings) that proved a Slayer’s central rule: vampires _weren’t_ people. He couldn’t afford to think that they were.

Gaara’s voice was high and tremulous when he spoke again, all grandeur gone. “Nagato,” he said again, pressing all his willowy weight into the name, “we can help you. We’re going . . . we’re going to cure this. Cure v-_vampirism_. No more hunting, no more being hunted. If Jashin had chosen anything for . . . f-for _us_, wouldn’t it be this? A chance to redeem ourselves – to repent?”

“Repent for _this_.” Nagato flipped his middle finger up high.

Gaara might have been speaking again, but Lee wouldn’t have known. The wind was whistling through the clearing again – real, non-metaphorical, _Weather Channel_ wind – needling through the haze and brushing at the ash. Fresh air felt blisteringly cold where it hit Lee’s exposed skin, stinging at the surfaces of his eyes, but the pain was welcome. It dug into his skin and drew him up straighter, making him more alert. Alert to signs of movement. Alert to the bright blue blur of Konan’s hair dipping as she moved her head, her limbs following haphazardly as a marionette’s.

_He remembered what happened the last time he’d tried to take a vampire alive._

Vampires were stronger and faster than humans were. The Revenant Infectious Pathogen let them achieve the superhuman, once it chewed away their humanity. But Konan had staked herself halfway to a second death, in her grand attempt to smoke her hunters out of the clearing. Her pale skin was tinged with a cloudy grey, and stretches of it peeled away from her ashen figure in flakes, scattering on the wind. Her joints cracked like the embers had. And so Lee had no problem bursting from his vantage at the edge of the ditch to tackle her, high-school-football-hard, slamming her so roughly into the grass he felt her crumbling shoulderblades shatter on the impact.

“Stay away from him,” he tried to warn her. There was still a stake in her trembling hands, after all, and she’d been on a beeline for Gaara – who now stood stock-still in horror. But Konan’s brown eyes were blank: there was no indication of fear or pain anywhere beneath her papery, flaking features.

“Nagato,” said Gaara, for a third time, “we can save her. Bring her back.”

Nagato moved wordlessly. Unlike Konan, he had all his strength, all his grace. He dove to the ground, ripped the stake from Konan’s hand, and drove it through her heart before Lee had the time to blink. She exploded into ash, and as Lee coughed, hacking the powdered remains of a dead woman from his chapstick, Nagato began to laugh.

“Back from what?” he rasped. “She’s already dead.”

_“She’s dead, idiot.”_

_ Yagura could have left Lee to die in the surf. He could have taken the gun from his decrepit mother, or flashed his fangs, and finished the job. But his mismatched eyes, with their glacial, opposite blues, were glinting like an alleycat’s, alive with cruelty. His hands were balled into fists at Lee’s chest, his bloodless knuckles white. He was clutching at Lee’s shirt, and pressing down on the wound. Staunching the bleeding._

_ Keeping him alive._

“Dead.”

_ Lee was desperate to speak, but when his lips quivered, he felt a bubble of warm, sticky blood rise in his throat. Later, he would find out that the wound had punctured his lung. As far as he knew now, it had clamped his chest in irons. He couldn’t feel the pain where he supposed it should have been, beneath the fresh hole in his chest. But he could feel something tingling and burning in sunbeams around it, needling through his senses until all he could feel was blistering, inexplicable heat. The liquid filling his chest wasn’t blood, or water, it was _magma_: burning hot, and so heavy it made everything else weightless._

_ But for all his weightlessness, Lee could not find the strength to move. He imagined his fingers shaking, and dreamed of bringing them to his face, to wipe the blood dribbling from his lips, but he couldn’t. Their shadows remainedlimp beneath the red water, and all was deafeningly silent . . ._

_ . . . Until it wasn’t. The beach came back to life as quickly as Lee had nearly died, sound crashing back into the thick air like a thousand more gunshots. The magma sloshed in his chest as the seawater battered against it, new ripples squeezing the blood and algae into accordion folds. Though his vision was blurring, turning the already-indiscernible details of the horizon into the world’s worst (and possibly most ironic) watercolour, Lee could make out a shape, thrashing in the water. Hair and seaweed broke the surface with heavy abandon, and knobby brown limbs splintered from the water at odd angles._

_ Rin Nohara was dead. Yagura had bitten her at her eighth grade graduation, and Lee had watched her die._

_ But she wasn’t dead anymore._

“Gaara,” panted Lee, “Gaara, are you . . . ”

Though Nagato was still hunched over the ashes of his not-quite-friend, a stake clutched in his paper-white fists, Lee didn’t register his threat – nor his presence. As ardently as the wind had tried to clear it, the air had filled with ash once more, and it _pressed_ down on the clearing, giddy with its new weight. Lee felt that he could scarcely stand under it, but he didn’t need to: all he needed to do was collapse into Gaara’s arms, and hold him tight to his chest, feeling his once-a-minute heartbeat struggle against cold skin and old scars.

“Gaara,” Lee breathed again, “come on. Let’s just . . . ” He was interrupted by a watery sob, and he had to breathe deep to try again. “We can still pull this off,” he said. He was whispering into Gaara’s hair, letting their limbs lock together like Lincoln Logs where they would otherwise have stood shaky and unsteady alone. But just like that, with one shampoo-muted sentence, Lee had built their tower too tall. It collapsed, and he fell with it, knocked flat on his backside as Gaara jerked away.

Ash crunched beneath his feet as he stood, and the bones of his face crunched right back, growling their dominance. Lee’s mouth was dry as he watched Gaara’s mouth split open, fangs pushing through his sobs. He barely let them settle before he moved – apparently, he had decided he was monster enough for what he planned to do. Lee watched in stunned silence as Gaara pounced. He was a blur of red, white, and blue as he ripped the stake from Nagato’s hands and plunged it deep into his throat.

“There are other vampires,” he hissed.

Lee said nothing at all. He watched embers flicker across Nagato’s crumbling body with a dull disinterest, wondering, vaguely, if another fire might clean the ash from his clothes. He wondered if Park Rangers would think a barbecue had gone horribly wrong here, today, or if Hidan – wherever _he _was – would make sure there were no Park Rangers to ask that questions. He wondered a lot of things, but when Gaara fumbled for his hand, dragging him away from the clearing, his thoughts were left behind.

They walked in silence for what felt like miles, letting the tree line congeal like an old bloodstain behind them, blocking the less savoury parts of the forest from even their hindsight. Somewhere along the way, the overcast sky gave in and broke open, spilling a fresh torrent of rain across the winding path. When Lee saw Gaara’s blue eyes glittering, and tiny drops clinging to his lashes, he decided he would blame the spring showers.

When they reached the Jeep, though, Lee couldn’t pretend any longer. He felt his own eyes begin to water as a sob racked Gaara’s body like a thunderclap, and squeezed their intertwined fingers until lightning bolts of pain shot up his arms. “Oh, gods,” Gaara was murmuring, over and over. “Oh, gods, oh, gods, oh gods ohgods _oh_—”

“Ssh,” said Lee, wrapping Gaara in a hug once more. He felt Gaara’s lips move in breathless prayer against his neck, and his breath was sticky and cold. His words built like the tide to a fever pitch, hyperventilating, and crashed again as Gaara took a shuddering breath.

“Gods almighty, Lee,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry?” Lee held him at arm’s length just to balk. “What . . . what for?”

It was Gaara’s turn to balk, letting his mouth fall slack and his eyes go wide. “I fucked up,” he breathed. “Gods . . . gods, I fucked up. I shouldn’t have tried talking to them. Shouldn’t . . . shouldn’t have killed him.”

“He would have killed you,” Lee said tightly. He knew it was true. Still, Gaara crumpled, swiping furiously at his eyes.

“We failed,” he spat, at last. “_I _failed.” Suddenly, he whipped around, and brought his fist down on the hood of the car. The metal dented under his fist. “I failed you,” he cried. “Lee, I . . . ”

“We’ve all failed someone,” said Lee, voice small. Disbelief had erased Gaara’s sharp features and redrawn them to comic-book proportions: bugging eyes, flared nostrils, tiny, tiny mouth. It was with a heavy sigh that Lee readied himself to erase the page. “Her name was Rin Nohara . . . ”

_Rin was – or had been – fourteen, and Lee was barely a year older. But as he blinked up at her, his body limp and old-man useless where it lay prone beneath him, he was overcome with the realisation that she was a_ child. _She hadn’t even started high school yet. The gap between fourteen and fifteen was more than just three hundred and sixty-five days. It was a lifetime of experiences that Rin was never going to have, and that Lee had phoned in for onlookers, as he spent his own eighth grade year stabbing the undead to death._

_ “Yagura?”_

_ Gods, she sounded like a _toddler_. But the longer Lee thought about her wobbly soprano, the shriller it seemed to him, until all he could hear was ringing. Whatever Yagura said in reply came to Lee as a high drone, like a bee on Benzedrine. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to put up any walls he could between him and the sound, but they were soon forced open again. With his one hand still pressed firmly to the bullet hole (bullet hole!) in Lee’s chest, Yagura had opened his other to slap Lee across the face, startling him awake._

_ “Careful,” he whispered, with a wolfish grin. His voice was so low, so singsong, that it cut through the flat ringing in Lee’s ears, popping the monotony with strange bubble-wrap staccato. “Don’t want you drifting off to dreamland just yet . . . and not alone.”_

_ Alone? Lee was never alone. He was alone all the time. A-lone, a _loan _. . . was he eligible for a bank loan? What was a Slayer’s credit supposed to look like? He knew what it_ sounded_ like: like the relentless ringing of a school bell or an unwanted phone call, rattling what was left of his brain into a protein shake._

Alone. _Then, _Wait. _He wasn’t supposed to be alone._

_ Though even drawing her name into his mouth set his lungs aflame, Lee shouted out all the same. His voice was throaty and guttural around the blood in his mouth. “Tenten!”_

_ “Lee!”_

_ Somewhere, somehow, she had made it to shore, and her footsteps glared from the hard-packed sand like a thousand new bullet holes (though they bled less profusely than the one that tore Lee’s shirt). A heap of orange fabric lay at her feet – Lee’s fragmented thoughts swung like a kaleidoscope until they pieced it together: that was Yagura’s mother’s dress, and she must have been unconscious inside of it. The logical leap made Lee’s legs threaten to give out from under him . . . though of course they weren’t holding him up any longer._

_ Longer. Long. Tenten had once told him that _“long”_ meant dragon. Lee felt far from draconic now. But he might very well have been flying like one, as weightless as he felt, and his insides were burning with something like dragonfire. His words felt like flames where they dragged along his mouth, which was impossibly dry even as he coughed his innards up into it._

_ “What?”_

_ It was all he could manage. Tenten was shouting something, waving her hands back and forth like she was trying to fight the sky, but the ringing of steel on metaphorical steel was too much for Lee to handle. His head wasn’t as weightless as his body was, but every time it dipped toward the surf, Yagura yanked him upright by the collar. It took Lee a moment to realise that the bones peeking from Yagura’s bloody lips were teeth: fangs bared in a triumphant smile._

_ Another figure was dashing toward the shore, and though Tenten lunged to apprehend it – them – _him_ – she was too slow, burdened by fatigue and the senior citizen at her feet. He, too, had the too-big head and too-skinny limbs that had so nauseated Lee on Rin Nohara: proportions that couldn’t be anything but a child’s. His were dwarfed by a blue sports jersey, and the colour alone was bright enough to set off the lightbulb in Lee’s brain. This was Obito Uchiha, Rin’s best friend. Two weeks ago, he had left a note in Neji’s locker, begging him (well, begging his friends, who could actually read it) to protect his friend Rin from what could only have been a vampire stalking her. Neji, high on freshman year and his latest master’s thesis, had concocted a plan. Not only would they save Rin from this monster, but they would save the monster itself. He could cure the RIP – he knew he could. He just needed a subject to test it on._

_ Tenten and Gai had been vocally against it. There was no curing a vampire. The only release for them was death. And Neji had been duly convinced. As a Watcher, he knew better than anybody what a vampire would do to a human, given the chance; as one of Gai’s wards, he knew better than anyone that the bite was a death sentence, no matter how long that sentence ran on._

_ But on a Baja-blast-fuelled stakeout, Lee had met Yagura for the first time. And he hadn’t seen him as a vampire – as one of the creatures that had nearly killed his father, that _had_ killed so many others – he saw a fourteen-year-old boy. He’d begged the others to reconsider: to try to take Yagura alive._

_ Yagura was not alive. Rin Nohara was not alive. Still, even then, even watching her die, and then _un_die, Lee had not been powerless. He had hope._

_ Now all he had was a bullet in his chest; and his own blood was rushing up his throat like the red tide toward the shore. Oh, gods. The red. He thought he had known it before, but the beach was tie-dye-faded to him now. New red spots were clouding his vision, a crimson so bright he _felt_ it, rather than saw it. It sawed through the tired fibres of his muscles, pulling them like the strings of a cat’s cradle as they jerked and dragged him back to life. It ignited in his palms, sparking along his red-raw knuckles as he pushed Yagura from his chest. It leaked from his skin and from the beach and through miles of blood-soaked soil, packing the sand as hard as a gravestone: hard enough for Rin to sprint across, pouncing for Obito._

_ “Rin?”_

_ He’d barely made the cry before she brought her fangs down on his throat. As he fell to the ground, though, the sun – having finally seen enough – began to dip beneath the waves, and Lee noticed that Isobu, Kiri, was no longer stained red._

Lee drove like a snail who had never heard of geometry: slowly and poorly. By the time he turned the Jeep back onto Kurama asphalt, the engine was rattling furiously, jabbing pinpricks of violent white light through the cover of the night sky. Gaara had dug his fingers into Lee’s thigh somewhere around the county line, gripping it until his leg was as bloodless as all of Gaara’s body. The silence to fall over them wasn’t quite comfortable, but it felt somehow safe: like an as-seen-on-TV weighted blanket that was just slightly too heavy, it kept the demons at bay at the cost of minor discomfort (plus shipping and handling). Still, when Lee finally lifted his voice to break it, he found that his voice had all the bright, cold comfort of the morning – of a new day.

“Hey,” he said, which was a start. “Hey, Gaara. You with me?”

Gaara pursed his mouth, rolling his pout forward and backward until twin spots of colour bloomed on his lips. Beyond that, though, he didn’t answer, and Lee kept his eyes trained on his mouth, unsure whether his lips were a target or a promise. When almost a minute passed under this new topcoat of silence, Lee made the decision for himself. He leaned in to plant a wary kiss to the corner of Gaara’s mouth, lingering there until he felt him smile.

“I’m with you,” he breathed, at last. He looked down at his hand, still resting on Lee’s thigh, and traced it slowly upward, sending arcs of electricity through Lee’s system – starting as a much-needed reboot, but building toward an overload. Lee cursed the heat building at the base of his stomach, and as Gaara pressed his head against his shoulder, tried his best to press it back whence it came.

Reprieve came in the twin glares of someone else’s headlights, blinking, catlike, through the windshield. Lee yelped at their flickering stare, and Gaara erupted in a peal of laughter. “We’ve yet to actually park, Lee,” he chided him, and Lee felt a flash of regret that he had taught Gaara what driving was on their ill-fated road trip all those days ago.

“I do so under great protest,” Lee sniffed, mock-haughty. “And only in hopes that it will convince you to relinquish the shotgun seat to someone more needy. I.e., me, looking for a footrest.”

“Oh, so you’d be happy to spend the whole night in the car, then, would you?”

“All right, maybe not. I do kinda want to take the mother of all showers.”

Gaara giggled again. After the silence and the crying, his laugh was dry from underuse, but not raspy – it was dry like kindling, waiting to catch a spark. Lee felt it fleeting beneath his skin. He knew that spark would fly at any second, and it would all catch fire. Already, he felt a burn, building deep in his core; it grew as he caught Gaara’s gaze, desire and desperation warring in his wide blue eyes.

“I could use a shower as well,” he confessed, hoarsely. “And the wind’s biting something awful tonight, isn’t it?” He sidled closer to Lee, reaching over him to open the driver’s side door. “I could do with some . . . some warming up.”

“S-some creature comforts,” Lee agreed. He could run a five-minute mile, but the distance from his seat to the curb left him breathless.

The corridor was dark, and the front door locked, which Lee took as a welcome sign. It meant they weren’t disturbing anyone as they laughed their way up the stairs – nor as Gaara pushed Lee against the door, and pushed the door up on its hinges. They stumbled over their feet and over the fragments of half-said words as they made their way inside, bumping light switches with their elbows and bumping corners with themselves. Lee’s every nerve was a live wire, the static of Gaara’s touch burning cold where it shocked against his skin. He was shivering even before Gaara’s fingers closed around the hem of his shirt, but chill or no chill, he was desperate to be out of his clothes. He longed to feel Gaara’s bare skin on his – and to put as much distance between himself and the ashes of the forest as he could. When Gaara’s lips finally, _finally_ closed on his, Lee gasped into the kiss, tugging Gaara like a lifeline into the bathroom.

The light crackled to life, and to Lee, its dull electric whine sounded like a symphony; its low-watt yellow glow was the warmest of golds, turning Gaara’s skin the colour of champagne and his touch ever more intoxicating. There was a wildfire at the pit of his stomach, but its burn was nothing like the wanton destruction of the woods. This was a cleansing fire.

_ Oh, right. Cleansing. _With one hand still hooked in the belt loop of Gaara’s jeans, Lee fumbled for the tap, cranking the water as hot as it would go. He didn’t bother to check whether it was running clean, free from rust – he brought his hand to the back of Gaara’s neck, tangling his fingers in his rusty curls, silently promising himself that he would take what he got.

“Gods almighty,” whispered Gaara, from somewhere behind their roaming hands. Lee grinned so wide it hurt, kicking his pants and his boxers from around his ankles. The smile remained fixed in place as Gaara leaned in again, his cold bones and Lee’s hard muscles butting awkwardly against each other as they sought out the warmth buried deep in the other’s plains. Soon, when Lee managed to crank the showerhead to life, they might have had the luck of melting into each other. As it was now, they shoved and groped their way through their tango, counting out the beats whenever one of them hit the wall, and gasping high harmonies against each other’s skin.

“Did you – ah! – did you lock the door?” Lee managed, his hands curling to fists at the small of Gaara’s back. Gaara had lowered his mouth to the hollow of Lee’s neck, teeth grazing his throat, sending a shock through his every word. He felt Gaara’s cool lips twist into a smile, and his composure broke around a startled laugh, his slight overbite breaking the too-neat symmetry of his teeth against Lee’s skin. Then it was back to business, with Gaara’s lips grazing his collarbone.

“Does it matter?” he purred. “We’re alone.” His hands roamed across Lee’s chest, listless, and came to a stop over a wizened, old scar. In the low light of the bathroom, Lee could see himself reflected in Gaara’s eyes, and saw the way the knot of silvered skin scattered the otherwise glassy blue.

Though Gaara’s voice was still low when he spoke again, it was soft, rather than sultry; the hunger abated from his gaze, its blaze softening to a candle’s flame. “That’s where she shot you.” He wasn’t really asking.

Lee lifted one of his hands to rest over the scar. In the weeks after it had happened, he’d tried everything he could to make the evidence of that night disappear, picking the skin raw before slathering it in aloe to heal it quicker. Gaara’s fingers ghosted over the scar, and warily, he pressed his lips against it. He kept them there for a long time, unmoving, his hands locked tight around Lee’s waist. But when Lee felt his fluttering breaths begin to peter out, running slow and thin as steam curled around his mouth, he caught Gaara’s eye once more. He’d lifted his head, letting Lee watch hunger etch itself into his features again, and his gaze kept dropping lower.

Lee twined their fingers together and grinned. “You first,” he said.

They ran hot far longer than the water did, and they were both grinning like idiots when they emerged, barely towel-clad, from the bathroom. But Lee stiffened (hands flying to the hem of his towel) when they were met by a comfortable warmth, rather than the empty-house chill he was expecting. “Who’s there?” he called, his voice pinched high by fear, and a now-familiar shiver worming down his spine.

“Oh, Jashin wept,” sighed Gaara, folding his arms over his chest. The two of them emerged from the hallway to find a kitchen full of people. There were Tenten, Temari, and Kankuro, their skin dotted with band-aids and marker doodles, and there were Neji and Sakura, slumped over binders and coffee. Hovering by the stove, a plate of grilled cheese sandwiches clutched like a shield in her pale hands, stood a familiar figure in a candy striper’s uniform and huge go-go boots. As Lee watched her shake her long blonde hair over her shoulders, he was struck by two facts: the first, that he was immensely grateful that his skin was too dark and Gaara’s too bloodless for either of them to visibly blush; and the second, that the last time Ino Yamanaka had stood in his kitchen, she had not come bearing good news.

“Grilled cheese?” was all she asked now. Lee stared at the floor, his cheeks burning.

“I . . . we . . . when did you all get here?” he wanted to know. A ripple of laughter passed over his friends, and Ino gave him a tight-lipped smile.

“Same time you did,” she confessed. “I blinked my headlights at you. It took us a while to find a parking spot, but . . . ” It was her turn to blush, and she kicked a chunky vinyl heel against the table leg. “Grilled cheese?” she asked again. Lee supposed it was as close as he would get to a fig leaf, and prayed it would do half as much to cover his modesty.

It was Sakura who helmed the discussion once Lee and Gaara were well and truly dressed (although Lee still felt naked under Tenten’s incredulous stare). She picked halfheartedly at her own sandwich, before setting it down on the table like a gavel. Lee buried his trembling hands in his pockets, barely meeting her gaze. She knew.

“I do,” said Sakura, when Lee voiced the thought. “I had my suspicions from the beginning. From what you two—” she gestured to Temari and Kankuro, who were pointedly staring anywhere but their brother “—told me, anyone in the Akatsuki old enough and brave enough to still be hanging around Slayerville was going to be something of a loose cannon. It would have been nice to take one of them in, but either way, you took them down.”

Gaara narrowed his eyes. “So it didn’t matter to you whether Lee and I succeeded?”

Sakura shrugged. “Of course it did,” she said coolly. “What I’m saying is that you would have succeeded either way. Either you captured a test subject, or you took out one of our enemies – and sent Hidan a message. Just like he did with . . . with Sasuke.”

Lee was too mortified – and, as the embers of the afternoon began to take light in his mind, all too _mortal_ – to be offended that she’d used them. “That’s Slayer thinking,” he mused, and Sakura brightened.

“I like to think so.”

“Wait.” Gaara frowned. “Even if I cottoned to that line of logic – which I’m _not_ saying I do – aren’t we still short a test subject? Ain’t that what this whole affair was all about?”

Anger clung burr-like to his words, and Lee moved as slowly as he could through its brambles to take Gaara’s hand. He had every right to be mad – even more so when Sakura simply shrugged again. He couldn’t bear to think that all they had done and been through had just been a detour.

“That’s, um, where I come in,” said Ino slowly. She paused, rolling her anxiety across her lips like chapstick, smoothing out its corners until she found the words. They came all in a rush. “Deidara Yamanaka,” she blurted out. “He’s my cousin. He’s the youngest member of the Akatsuki. And he’s, um . . . he’s in the trunk of my car.”

Realisation dawned on Lee slowly, but he felt himself brighten when it did. Konan and Nagato were dead, and they had a test subject. And they were _alive_. It was the first time in weeks he felt that they were playing with a home-field advantage, but the court was theirs, now. _And _damn_ Hidan if he thinks he can take that from us._

The grilled cheese sandwiches began making the rounds again, skipping like stones over the brook-babble of conversation. Lee squeezed Gaara’s hand. “Are you ready?” he asked. “To end this?”

“No,” said Gaara. “But I have you, don’t I?”

“Always,” said Lee. Gaara smiled, ducking behind a loose swoop of hair.

“Then I suppose I’m ready for anything.”

Lee could only hope, with all they faced, that it was true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can we take a minute to talk about how you are the most patient wonderful loving supportive simp readers on the planet?? i just disappear for months on end and still wake up to the loveliest comments and kudos and notes and . . . Well. Maybe. Jus Maybe. I Love You All innit

**Author's Note:**

> we irritating . . .  
find me on [tungle.hellsite](https://gidget-goes.tumblr.com) for sporadic fic updates


End file.
